And If I Die Before I Wake
by rmartin318
Summary: When Stiles wakes up on his eighteenth birthday from a chaste dream about Derek Hale he doesn't think it's a big deal. But when he wakes up the next few days to the same dream, he knows something is going on. And he's going to get to the bottom of it. Once is an incident, twice is a coincidence, and three times is a pattern. More than three is just torture.


And If I Die Before I Wake

The dreams started the night of Stiles' eighteenth birthday. When he woke up on his big day for his dad's famous Stilinski Pancakes (patent pending), he took a quick shower and couldn't shake off the feeling of strong arms holding him.

That's all the dream had been, two strong arms and a muscular chest holding him closely, his back to their front. Spooning. Stiles Stilinski had a spooning dream on his first day of legally being able to bone any adult he wanted and his stupid subconscious comes up with this shit? Where was the thick cock pounding him into the mattress? Where were the breasts that never left his touch?

Stiles frowned slightly as he toweled himself off. It wasn't really a big deal, it's not like he didn't have sexy time dreams every other night of the week. It was, after all, the only way his body would get any action what with the spazzing and flailing and general horrible timing of werewolf crises that made him seem freakier than he already was. No one wants to sex him up, but that was okay for now because nobody could see what a gem Stiles was anyway.

Not that he would turn someone (anyone) away, he wasn't a snob or anything. He had just resigned himself to the sad fact that everyone in this town A) already knew he was a weirdo and so he wouldn't fool them for long enough to get in their pants, B) was a werewolf and therefore way too hot for him, or C) knew he was the Sheriff's son and was therefore not only jailbait but a huge red flag so big that you could see it from the moon. That last one was mostly for the hotties that hung out around the Jungle, who showed their appreciation via their eyes, but wouldn't come within five feet of him for fear of his father throwing the weight of the law at them. No one wants to have to introduce themselves as a sex offender.

That was why this dream struck him as so strange, and Stiles kept a wary eye out for strange, unusual, unique, dangerous, and/or out of the ordinary situations. He had to in order to keep afloat in the dangerous world of werewolves and shape shifters. Stiles didn't have dreams unless they were naughty dreams.

By the time he got downstairs to eat with his dad before school, the Sheriff had two plates set out and even a vase with a single purple flower in it. Stiles rolled his eyes when he saw it.

"Dad, just because I like boys too—as in, in addition to girls—doesn't mean _I'm_ a girl. What's with the flower?"

He grabbed two flapjacks before his butt even hit the seat and shoveled them into his mouth. "What, a father can't do something fancy for his adult son these days? What are you the birthday police?"

"No, you are." He bit out between mouthfuls of heaven. "These are uh-mazing. Oh my God, I want to marry them and have little pancake Stilinskis. You can be grandpa to my little silver dollars. Ugh, more."

His dad's face did that thing where it struggled to figure out if it wanted to show amusement or annoyance. His dad's face did that a lot.

"Alright, I have to leave. I'm going to be late."

"Sandra still on your ass about punctuality?"

The Sheriff shot him a look. His face also did that a lot. "Don't let Officer Smeldon catch you calling her by her given name."

"I would rather be smothered in an avalanche, actually." Stiles choked out, he had a healthy knowledge of his own fear these days. If it didn't rank higher than an abduction by Peter Hale or Gerard Argent, then he wasn't too worried about it. Officer Smeldon easily ranked a Pixies-on-the-loose level of caution.

His father tilted his head to the side like he was considering it. "Yeah, I think I would too. It wouldn't be such a bad way to go."

"And there's always a chance a friendly abominable snowman will come rescue us."

"Bye Stiles, see you after school. Straight after school." The Sheriff's voice got stern, and when he received verbal confirmation from his son, he buckled his sidearm, put on his jacket, and walked out the door.

Stiles finished his pancakes in sacred silence. Matrimony was a holy sacrament, and Stiles took the commitment seriously. He raised his last bite up to eye level, half way falling off his fork.

"Til death do us part," He whispered before he took that last bite and was once again a single man.

Scott and Lydia spoiled him at school. Scott handed him his mom's famous cupcakes and Lydia asked him to come over to her house after school for his present. Two years ago, Stiles might have fainted (would have) at the prospect, but now his only reaction was mild annoyance that she didn't just bring it to school.

"It's not something you can just bring to school, idiot. Just come to my house." She thumped him on the head and turned on her pretty heel to go be a bad ass bitch in the highest level math class that Beacon Hills High School offered.

The day went by quickly—too quickly for Stiles' taste. It was rare that he got to be the center of attention without some sort of negative attached to it. Sure when those fairies kidnapped him last August, the pack swarmed around him to help him heal, and yeah okay, there was the time he caught the whole pack staring at him when Erica decided to work out in her sports bra, but it wasn't his fault that boobs are his weakness and their super powered noses could all smell his appreciation of them.

Werewolves were the worst. They can tell everything you're thinking, either by their gross noses or the beating of your heart. Each of the wolves in the pack had these advantages over him, even if they varied on how good they were at interpreting the signs (Derek being the best, and Scott being abysmal). The point was to fight fire sometimes you have to use fire. So while the pack got stronger with every training session, Stiles got smarter and more knowledgeable. Forewarned is forearmed, as Deaton liked to say.

He researched the shit out of things, and where Google and the internet let him down, Stiles bombarded Deaton and Derek with question after question until he was sure that he knew everything there was to know about werewolves.

Later that night, after Lydia dropped a box full of old texts about werewolf lore into the trunk of his car and he bowed down to worship her as is her due, the pack met up at Derek's apartment, the unofficial but kind of official meet up spot for pack occasions.

As far as apartments in Beacon Hills go, Stiles thought Derek's could have been much worse. Especially with his penchant for dark colors and gloomy spaces. Derek sighed his Stiles is being an idiot sigh when confronted with this opinion, and calmly explained that Peter picked it out. Yeah, that explained it perfectly. Say what you will about Peter Hale, and Stiles had said just about everything there was to say, voraciously, loudly, sarcastically, but that mofo knew his way around Home Depot and he definitely knew quality when he saw it.

The pack held all their celebrations at Derek's, as it should be. The alpha's den in any pack is the most sacred space in the territory. Stiles read about this at length on the internet, so when it came time for Derek to find an acceptable home base, Stiles was the only one not to tease him for taking so long and being so picky. In retrospect, Stiles should have guessed that Peter had a hand in picking out the perfect two bedroom loft. Derek's previous choices of den lair being an abandon train station and the house his family burned to death in kind of set him up for failure on that front.

Derek had to be careful about how much the pack knew of Peter's involvement, though. None of them trusted him, and with good reason. Lydia still wasn't over the traumatizing events that brought her into the fold, and Scott hated Peter for biting him. Isaac, Boyd, Erica, and Cora didn't understand Peter's place as a wolf, uncle, or not-dead-any-more-zombie-wolf and so didn't trust him accordingly.

Stiles, on the other hand, Stiles understood Peter pretty well and that's why he certainly didn't trust him. Peter could be trusted with things like home décor and dinner, but he could not be trusted with anything that he could turn around and use as an advantage.

So he sat on the periphery of the pack, nominally invited to all pack events, but discouraged from staying too long.

Peter made a quick appearance for Stiles' birthday, which was more than he made for Jackson's or Boyd's or even Isaac's last month. Stiles wondered if he should feel special. Did Peter consider kidnapping him some sort of bond that needed to be honored on his birthday? Stiles could live without that.

They ate pineapple pizza, root beer, and washed it all down with curly fries in a reflection of Stiles' favorite things, then continued the Stiles-centric theme by watching every Marvel movie made in the last five years.

The best part was that when Derek tried to sneak out, like he sometimes did, like he was self-conscious of his presence in his pack, Stiles caught the back of his Henley and pulled him onto the couch next to Stiles' usual spot. He thought there was a bug on his shoulder for a second, but shrugged it off as he focused on getting him maneuvered back onto the couch. Derek could have broken the hold easily, and would have if it were anyone other than Stiles and it were any day other than Stiles' birthday. But he did have a heart down deep in his fangy, growly, Norse god body so he just shrugged at being caught out and sat down to laugh at Thor's inappropriate social behavior.

"Yeah like you have any room to judge, Sourwolf." Stiles whispered under his breath so as not to disturb the pack even though they would hear it anyway. It was the thought that counted.

"I was never that bad. At least I know the rules."

"That makes it worse, not better, that you choose to not follow them." Stiles threw his left arm around the back of the couch. "I'm just saying that if you have to use someone's bedroom window to get into their house, then maybe you shouldn't be there in the first place."

"Or maybe someone's father is the Sheriff and will _arrest_ that person _again_ if they are caught in his house while _someone_ is there for life or death purposes."

Stiles conceded he had a point, but he wasn't giving up on this one. "Well maybe if _someone_ had come clean and told _other people_ some important _life or death_ facts, then _someone_ wouldn't have been accused of _murder_ in the first place."

"Can you guys shut up?" Scott said from the mattress on the floor, his head on Isaac's stomach and his feet on Allison's. "Thor is about to kick Loki's ass, okay? This is the best part."

Stiles tried to not talk anymore, he really did. He tried like 80%, okay? "I'm sensing a connection here. Thor—Norse god, built like a house, evil relatives he has to defeat and then put in their place, horrible with women, horrible with people in general, weird obsession with facial hair…"

"Shut up, Stiles," Derek said while showing off his claws and his scarlet eyes. The pack tried to hide their amusement unsuccessfully.

"Yes, your highness." Stiles could be wrong, but he thought he saw a ghost of a smile on Derek's face in the corner of his eye. They watched the rest of the movie in silence.

After _Thor_ and _The Avengers_ Stiles insisted on birthday cake. Lydia produced a cake from literally nowhere. It might have been in her purse, but the cake was still pristine. Trust Lydia to hide something from everyone's prying eyes (and noses).

Stiles blew out candles, said good night to everyone while they left and when he was the last one at Derek's, quietly thanked him for the night.

Stiles knew from his research that most alphas do not do this type of behavior—pack bonding through their human sides. Most packs that don't consist of families don't even know the birthdays of their pack members because they don't matter. Animals don't care about things like birthdays, and in packs like those, the animal nature rules out over the human.

Stiles also knew that aside from maybe Lydia the rest of the pack didn't know that Derek treated them a thousand times better than any other alpha would. They think they dodged a once in a life time crazy out of control alpha like Peter for the regular, but in reality Peter's style of alpha was more aligned with the historical records of pack hierarchies.

All that alpha power went to the head. Looking back on it, Stiles could pinpoint that power in Derek's behavior before he learned to properly control it. He turned three (four if you count Jackson, which Stiles tried never to do) in the space of a week. He used manipulation to gather their permission before he bit them, knowing that a reluctant beta like Scott would be much more challenging to corral than a teenager who actively asked for the bite by thinking it was something that they wanted.

Derek learned from the kanima. Specifically, his mistakes that led to the creation of the kanima and the kanima's destruction of Beacon Hills. Watching something you created used as a tool for chaos and carnage was bad enough, but realizing that everything you ever knew about alphas was the wrong way to deal with the situation—well, that was even tougher. Derek's mother, from what Stiles had gathered, was a good family alpha, but she was distant and cold with the power that inherently separated her from her beta family.

Stiles could see in Derek that he loved his mother deeply, and that his mother loved him, but they weren't close. Over time, he'd begun to open up to Stiles in quiet moments about his family and life before the fire. He talked most often of Laura, then the rest of the family, and then his mother only on one occasion. Derek didn't even seem to think that was strange, so Stiles held his opinion to himself for once. The point was, for born wolves alphas weren't supposed to be too close to their pack. That's how the alpha got the pack killed.

When the alpha started caring too much about putting their betas in the way of threats to the territory, then the territory fell and with it, the pack.

Derek tried to emulate this as much as possible in his early days of alpha-dom. He was rough with his newly turned betas, emotionally distant, not empathetic. This only served to turn them against him, especially since these teenagers had never been werewolves before and didn't know the dynamic of a pack and had no one explain it to them.

Stiles conjectured that it really hit Derek when Erica and Boyd left the pack that this style wasn't working, and that he was actively driving his pack away. Stiles never had this confirmed by Derek, but he spent way more time thinking about this than anybody would have guessed.

So after the kanima was cured and Stiles' heart was metaphorically ripped out of his chest, Derek got desperate and Stiles needed a new hobby to replace any spare second of time that could be used to think about Lydia and her life saving love for douchebag Jackson.

Derek came through his window on a Wednesday in the last week of school, two days after Jackson's death.

Luckily Stiles wasn't doing anything embarrassing this time, he was just finishing studying for finals and obsessing over the Lydia situation. He wished he could say he was startled at Derek's entrance, but those days it was hard to be startled by anything mundane like a Norse god forcing your locked window open and coming through.

"Did you just—? Oh my God, you broke the lock, didn't you? You're paying to replace that. I know you have loads of money and nothing to spend it on but gas. You're so paying for that."

Derek walked over to his desk and shut his laptop right on his fingers.

"What the hell, dude? I was studying. I have finals coming up. You know, school? That's a thing I still have to do."

"You'll be fine. You're smart enough."

Stiles would be thrilled at that compliment, but the tone suggested it wasn't meant to be taken that way. "I would say thanks, but… So what are you doing here?"

"I need your help."

"Did you strain a muscle having to say that?"

"I could strain a muscle hitting you in the face."

"If you think it will _help_." Stiles laughed at his joke. He opened his laptop back up, just to be defiant. Derek didn't own him, he didn't dictate what he was and wasn't allowed to do. Derek had made it perfectly clear that Stiles wasn't part of his pack, he was Scott's. "What do you need? Is something going to eat us? Is it supernatural? Should I prepare a will? Oh my God, why haven't I prepared a will? I should—"

"So you can leave your Xbox to Scott? You don't own anything else, moron. You don't need a will."

Which was surprisingly reassuring to Stiles. "You're right. I'm sure my dad will know that Scott gets the Xbox. I mean, what would my dad even do with it, right?"

Derek, in all his wisdom, chose to ignore that remark. "How do I fix it?" He spit out through gritted teeth, like it was physically painful for him to ask. That confused Stiles, he took in Derek's body language, shoulders tense, arms crossed, but eyes still making direct contact with Stiles'.

Stiles kind of thought that Derek was one of those people who were super into eye contact. Maybe it was the werewolf thing, but Stiles was sure it had more to do with being one of those people who were so intimidatingly beautiful that they didn't even realize some people were uncomfortable looking at them.

"Fix what?" Stiles asked softly, he could see now that this was serious. Derek wouldn't come to him (someone outside the pack) for help unless he desperately needed it and something was desperately wrong.

"The pack. I don't—" He took a deep breath, and Stiles tried to shoot out helpful stay calm vibes.

"What's the problem, Derek?"

"The pack isn't a pack and I don't know why or how to fix it."

Stiles always asked questions to get to the bottom of a problem, he was inquisitive by nature and Derek's wasn't exactly forthcoming on his own and having Stiles ask him direct questions could help them determine what was important for Stiles to know in order to form a plan.

"Let's start from the beginning I guess." Stiles thought quickly. He had a good idea why the pack wasn't right, but he needed to know more about what they did as a group when pesky humans weren't around. "So what did you used to do to try to, I dunno, get the betas to trust each other? Like trust falls and shit?"

"What? No." Derek looked genuinely confused. Like the idea of a pack-mate catching him when he fell was utterly ridiculous and Stiles was utterly ridiculous for even suggesting he might have had his new pack do something so stupid. "We trained. Like a pack."

This might be harder than Stiles originally thought, the difference between drinking water from a well and drinking water pulled out of a stone. "And what does that entail? Hitting each other?"

"Yes there's hitting, but it's about strategy and how to defeat your opponent."

"Okay, now we're getting somewhere. Did you plan any kind of team games, or did you just expect them to trust each other and you?"

"We're pack." More incredulity. "They're supposed to trust each other."

"But they don't."

"No."

Stiles felt like some sort of therapist when he asked his next question. To be fair though, Derek could probably use some therapy. All that man-pain had to be bad for the digestion at least. "Why do you think that is?"

"I don't know!" Derek bit out. "Why do you think I came to _you_ of all people for help? You see this stuff and I don't. I don't know why they don't trust each other and I especially don't know why they don't trust me."

"Do you trust them?"

"No. I don't trust anyone," He replied back a little too quickly.

"Well I think that's a big part of it, don't you? Could you trust an alpha who didn't trust you? Trust is earned, everyone knows that, but it's also an exchange. An exchange of trust is what a group of people in a military like situation need in order to survive. The general needs to trust his commands will be carried out and the soldiers need to trust that the general has a plan and that their orders are in sync with the greater good of their cause."

Derek looked like he didn't necessarily agree. In fact, Derek looked like he vehemently disagreed. Stiles was kind of done with this conversation though. He did actually have some finals to study for, his focus was worse than usual with his trying to avoid but unable to avoid the bleak situation with Lydia.

"You came to me for my opinion on this because as you said, you can't see it. So you need to start trusting and you can start by trusting that I'm right on this, Derek. The pack needs to change to be better than it is. That starts with changing how they see each other and you change that by changing how you approach them. Trust them first, and see what happens. Come back tomorrow and I'll have more ideas."

A little stroll through Google about team building exercises, a few hours browsing over his school work with half his brain on his new task and not on his red haired goddess, and true to his word, Stiles had plenty more ideas for Derek to implement the next day.

Getting him to actually use them took a bit more finesse and carefully constructed logic than he needed to obtain the information, but that was alright because Stiles desperately needed this challenge, and Derek was nothing if not challenging. For someone who lacked foresight so keenly, he sure had no problem letting Stiles know how little he trusted that this wasn't some elaborate ruse set up to discredit him as alpha or something. Like Stiles could think up an entire plot to de-throne him all while planting the idea in Derek's head in the first place to come to him for help. To be honest, as annoying as the apprehensive attitude Derek had about this was, Stiles couldn't help but be a little flattered that Derek thought so highly (lowly) of him.

Later Stiles would put it together as the alpha power taking over again in its paranoia and only attribute about 65% of the caution to Derek's inherent personality.

After a few more days of constant arguing over this, Stiles couldn't leave this challenge alone for more than a few minutes or he would start thinking about things best left avoided, they came to a compromise: Derek would do Stiles' stupid plans if Stiles himself was there to chaperone them. At first this seemed like a huge show of trust on Derek's part, but when Stiles arrived at the Depot with his laptop and four DVDs for the pack to decide between and the alpha himself wasn't there at all, Stiles indulged himself in a good sigh and eye roll that always itched to come out when he dealt with Derek.

It took some persuading, but Boyd, Isaac, Jackson (and Lydia), Erica, and Cora eventually settled on _Mean Girls_ and by the time Cady upstaged Regina George, they were screaming quotes over one another. Jackson was surprisingly good at it. Stiles considered this a step in the right direction and actively encouraged them since Derek wasn't there to be prodded into it. The second part of Stiles' plan, and the part that Derek most strongly resented, was giving the pack more positive reinforcement and less punishment. He spent like five hours on Wikipedia pouring over classical conditioning and operant conditioning for that one, and he thought he could make it work if the pack were oblivious to the plan. Once again, Derek's absence threw a stint in that plan. Their reward would serve better from their authority figure—Derek—but since he couldn't even be bothered to show up to his own solution to his own problem that Stiles so nicely provided, he could suck it and Stiles would just have to do it himself.

Thinking back on it, Stiles figured this was probably his first step towards being second in charge. None of the wolves had stepped up. Stiles figured that Derek had been hoping Scott would return to the fold and fill that empty place, but Stiles was working one miracle at a time right then and Scott was trying to work his own miracle in his finals. So until Scott could return and take that place, Stiles figured he would just have to make the roll Stiles shaped and step right into it.

By the time finals were done, and the first hesitant weeks of summer had passed, Stiles felt the pack fall into place, one square of fabric at a time that would one day make a nice quilt. There were two gaping holes, however, and Scott and Derek were needed to complete them.

Of the two options on where to start, Stiles reluctantly decided that Scott would be easier. He already had an ally in Isaac and each pack member had either helped or been helped by Scott in the past. There was precedent to trust one another, so Stiles just had to play to those already formed tethers and build them up.

After that first movie night, Stiles had immediately changed how the pack trained together. Instead of fighting one on one, he had them play man hunt, capture the flag, hide and seek, stupid and mindless games from their childhood that took on new strategies in their teenage years. To bring Scott in, he timed a perfectly placed home base for hide and seek—his own house. His dad was at the office, trying to replace his lost deputies and Stiles needed Scott to see the pack having fun on their own terms and without Derek.

The last part was surprisingly easy as Stiles hadn't seen hide nor hair of Derek since he finally capitulated into letting Stiles fix his pack. Just as Stiles thought would happen, Scott got suckered into playing with Isaac's baby blues and Jackson's taunts that he wouldn't beat him. Just like that, the pack added another werewolf member (and a raven haired human) and Stiles continued to praise their efforts, as a whole and individually when they made progress.

In June, when Erica finally could control her shift (which he heard about from a proud Boyd, Stiles still wasn't allowed with the pack on full moon nights, those were still Derek's turf) he took her out for ice cream, one on one. When Jackson learned to differentiate anger from resentment by just smell alone, Stiles got Isaac, Scott, and Boyd to play two v. two lacrosse as a reward. When Stiles realized that he didn't know Cora nearly as well as he knew the others, he took her out for coffee and asked her millions of mundane questions about herself that wouldn't anger her or cause her pain about her family or about her time away. By the way she lit up, Stiles could tell that no one had made the effort with her. It broke his heart.

Gradually, he came to know the pack and the pack came to know him. The first time a wolf came to him with a question instead of asking for Derek, he was stunned but used his usual brand of humor to gloss over the fact that he had no idea what to do about it. When Isaac started to sense bullshit, Stiles caught himself. He wasn't going to be like Derek, there was a reason Isaac came to him and not Derek. Stiles would be upfront and honest with the knowledge he had.

"Isaac, man, I have no idea if the new moon is affecting your anxiety. I could look it up?" At Isaac's hopeful puppy eyes, Stiles felt stronger. "Yeah, you know what? I'm gonna go research it right now. I'll be at the library if anyone needs me okay?" He patted him on the head as he grabbed his keys from the Depot's make shift key ring. "You're in charge."

That was another strange side effect of hanging with a bunch of werewolves, the touching. They all did it all the time. All the pack members touched each other a lot too, but between themselves it seemed much more casual than how they touched Stiles. It seemed to be a weird like compulsion to touch him when they were near. Even Jackson. Like the reassurance he'd been giving them verbally needed to be confirmed with a physical link. It was the behavior they were supposed to treat their alpha with, not some puny human. The thought terrified Stiles, and with good reason.

The next week, when Stiles had given up all hope of ever seeing Derek again in Beacon Hills, he woke up to a menacing red glare beaming down on him in the pre-dawn hours of the night.

"Oh my God," Stiles jerked awake, "What the fuck are you doing?"

Derek didn't remain stationary just as much as he didn't bother to answer the question. Questions seemed to be beneath him when he wasn't actively asking for help. Things like "you faint at the sight of blood?" and "How do I fix it?" came to mind.

"What the hell have you been doing, Stiles? I asked you to fix my pack not make them your pack!"

"What are you—?" It was really too early for this. God, what a creeper.

"They think you're their alpha!" His eyes hadn't shifted from the luminous red and it was starting to give Stiles Halloween of '98 flashbacks. Not in a good way.

"No they don't," he protested weakly, knowing it was a lie and that Derek would know Stiles knew it was a lie.

Derek grabbed him by his sleep shirt, dragging his face up close and personal for some bodily intimidation. Derek had a few skills that worked for him, but the sad news was he would never be as terrifying as his uncle as the alpha and Stiles couldn't find it in his sleepy heart to be as terrified at having an alpha wolf out in his face as he should be.

"Well they would know who their alpha was if their alpha was _here_ the last month to take care of them!" Derek threw him back onto his bed.

"I was dealing with Peter."

"Pssht, like funeral arrangements? Not a good excuse, Derek. He's been gone like half a year now."

"He's back."

"What do you mean?" Derek didn't answer and they sat silently for a few minutes of torture while Stiles tried very hard to let him find the words. His patience ran out rather quickly. "What do you mean, Derek? C'mon, big guy, use your words."

The alpha looked up at the ceiling like he was looking for a sign from heaven or something and the only reason Stiles even knew that is because he still couldn't control his shift enough to make his eyes normal again.

"Lydia brought him back. That's what her party was about, he came back that night but we were dealing with the kanima, so…"

"So you let a psychopath sit by the wayside while you dealt with another problem you created?!" Stiles covered his eyes with his hands. Would this idiot ever fucking learn? "You are not allowed to do the planning ever again. I totally mean that." He moved his hand down to pinch the bridge of his nose, suddenly feeling centuries old instead of seventeen.

Stiles took a deep breath. "What's been happening then? Is he taken care of? Do we need to come up with a plan to take care of him? What's the dealio?"

"You keep saying 'we' there is no 'we' here."

"What? Are you kidding me?"

"You aren't pack, Stiles."

Oh hell to the no. "Like fuck I'm not. I'm so pack that the pack think I'm the leader of the pack, so fuck you very much."

"No, fuck you for taking my pack from me."

"You can't take something from someone if they don't have it in the first place." Stiles practically roared. "What you had—that wasn't a pack, okay? That was three scared teenagers, two of whom were terrorized by a pack of alphas, a newly turned wolf who was so fucked up he was a lizard, and your traumatized little sister that you didn't bother to talk to about anything. That wasn't a pack. What I did though? I made them a pack. I made them a pack because _you fucking asked me to_."

Stiles was definitely awake now. He felt himself sit up as he was talking, his face leaning closer to Derek's side of the room. Derek could say what he wanted about Stiles, but he didn't get to malign the pack, or Stiles' place in it, because he hadn't been there to form it properly.

"In fact, oh alpha mine, I would say I went above and fucking beyond. You wanted Scott? I brought Scott. You wanted a cohesive fighting force that trust each other? Delivered. The only thing I haven't provided was their trust in you, but I couldn't do that because you haven't been around. So yeah, I'm pack and you'll just have to deal with that while we all deal with whatever's next."

In the dark room, Stiles' newly adjusted eyes could see Derek's face sour. Good, he was getting that Stiles was right even though he didn't want to admit it.

"Now, back on subject." Stiles held firm, using what the pack had come to call his serious business voice. "What's going on with Peter?"

Derek stilled looked angry, but he latched on to the new topic in order to get away from his own failings. "I know he had something to do with the alpha pack, I'm not sure what. I got the impression that he brought them here and they investigated us long enough to see if the threat was gone—Peter and probably Jackson too. That's why they left so suddenly, they saw we were mostly stable."

"Okay, good background info, certainly good to know, but what's the threat level on Peter now? Like an orange?"

"Yellow," Derek said back. "He's promised to stay in line and not interfere with my pack as long as he can technically be a part enough to not fall to omega level. So, we need to be cautious."

"You're going to let him be a part of the pack? After all he's done?"

"I'm not happy about it, Stiles. But as you've just taught me, even as alpha I don't always get to choose who becomes pack, do I?"

Stiles let that one pass. "At least make him an orange. And first things first, you need to talk to the pack about this. Actually talk, not just bark orders and expect them to be carried out. I have them trained now and they expect at least one good line of logic behind every order. Until you prove you know what you're doing, they aren't going to blindly follow you. You get that right?"

He nodded. "I don't like it, but I get it."

"Just sit them down before next movie night and explain your thought process behind inviting Peter back into the Hale pack, okay? They're smart, they'll get it and they'll feel like you trust them."

"I get it. You can stop lecturing."

"Well, then you can get out while I go back to sleep. Good God, why'd we have to talk about this now, anyway? Can't a guy with insomnia get every little bit of sleep he can?"

Derek didn't deign to answer, but he did rub his hands on Stiles cheeks to scent mark him before he left just as noiselessly through the window with the still broken lock.

"You still owe me a new lock, Hale!" He threw out there, not bothering to raise his voice because he knew Derek would hear him regardless.

And that's how the last piece of the quilt came together, with an additional stain by the name of Peter Hale.

Stiles was surprised to wake up as eighteen years and one day old to discover that he'd had the exact same dream two nights in a row. As his dad says, once is an incident, twice is a coincidence… if it reached three times, then Stiles would panic. Until then, why worry about it? It's not like it was a bad dream. Even if it was prophetic, having some strong arms hold him close wouldn't be the worst thing in the world to happen to him.

It actually sounded kind of nice. Stiles deserved nice things. Nice forearm things. Whatever.

Just like the day before, Stiles pushed the dream into the back of his mind. When you ran a werewolf pack like he did, you had to get used to prioritizing pretty quickly. Things like nice dreams that helped you sleep better just weren't worth worrying about in relation to things like pixies on the war path, kanimas also on the war path, or a stray omega (possibly on the war path).

Since it was a Saturday in October, quickly coming up on Halloween, Stiles took the opportunity to buy some candy, knowing that if he waited any longer all the good stuff would be gone, but also knowing that if he had gotten it any sooner he ran the chance of his father getting into it.

At the store, Stiles impulsively picked up a second bag of mixed candy delights. He knew there was no way it would have occurred to Derek to pick some up, and his apartment building was in a very family friendly area of town and was bound to receive some trick or treaters. Never let it be said that Stiles Stilinski got in the way of small children having sugar. Not on his watch.

He dropped his own groceries off at home and when he saw that his father was working, sped on over to Derek's to drop off his contribution to Halloween with the pack. As he opened the door with his key, it became clear that Lydia and Allison's contributions were decorations. Stiles found it amusing that even though the pack hadn't officially mentioned Halloween plans, already events were pointing to it becoming a pack event. Stiles, as a kid whose father had to work Halloween nights for as long as he could remember, actively was looking forward to the holiday for the first time since his mother's death.

Mom had a soft spot for Halloween and anything scary or horror themed. Instead of dressing him up in clown costumes or a character from Sesame Street, Stiles had picture proof that he went dressed as a zombie for his first Halloween.

Stiles tried to keep up her traditions around holidays. In the case of Halloween, she would decorate the house in fake cobwebs with black spiders sitting in them, pumpkins carved into jack-o-lanterns, and she passed out the candy in a bowl that had a motion sensor on it that would scream when the trick or treater stuck their hand in the bowl of candy. Keeping up the tradition was hard on Stiles, and harder on his dad, but it made him feel closer to her than sitting next to a marble slab of a gravestone ever would.

In the graveyard she was dead. In their decorated home, she lived on.

Lydia and Allison took his hints about the cobwebs and ran with them. There were fake bats hanging from the ceiling, Stiles had no idea how Lydia had managed that at all, and in the corner that usual sat empty, a seven foot tall Frankenstein replica stood vigil. How odd that it looked completely _right_ there.

"Derek, I see you finally made a friend," he said into the empty apartment, knowing that Derek would probably hear it. One good thing about werewolves, Stiles found from experience that it was important to list these and to remember that werewolves didn't bring only bad news, was that they were more likely to hear the jokes that he usually just made to himself. Meaning that now his hilarity could be spread around.

He heard a suspicious giggling coming from Derek's room, so Stiles dropped the bag of candy and other miscellaneous things he was sure Derek would forget to buy or just flat out refuse to buy (Kleenex, dish soap, hand towels, ect. He tried not to overwhelm him with items all at once). Popping the door open, Stiles got a clear view of Isaac and Scott puppy piling in Derek's bed.

"Good one, Stiles," Isaac said with his head propped up on Scott's stomach while Scott played with his hair.

For serious though, what the fuck was going on in that strange threesome? For once, Stiles was certain that his philosophy on knowledge was not correct here, more was not better.

"Thanks, buddy." Isaac preened under the appreciation. "So what's up with you guys? Where's Derek?"

"We're just waiting for him to come back from picking up Boyd and Erica. He found a rare scent that he wants us to pick up so that we won't think there's like some weird creature on the loose, we'll know it's just a—was it a cougar, Isaac?"

Isaac confirmed Scott's story, "Yeah, a cougar. He says it's actually pretty rare for cougars to come around Beacon Hills since there've always been werewolves here to compete over prey."

Stiles nodded. For a second he was worried that Derek didn't trust him with some strange scent in the woods, but if Derek recognized it as a cougar and just wanted the pups to be able to recognize it as well, that wasn't a big deal. He didn't tell Derek every time he learned something new about werewolves either.

"He coming back soon?"

They nodded, both content to stay exactly as they were. Isaac's head raised off Scott's stomach a moment later, looking as if he'd just thought of something.

"Scott, should we ask him? Do you think…?"

Scott looked like he was thinking about it, whatever it was, while Stiles spastically looked between the two of them. He hated not knowing everything going on with Scott, but on the other hand, if it had to do with what was quickly becoming a clusterfuck of a romantic situation he really didn't want to know. Either way, Scott seemed to make a decision that would take it out of his hands.

"Yeah, if we can trust anyone to tell us, it's Stiles. He might know already, or he might have to look it up, but, well, you know Stiles…"

"Then yeah, let's ask. You can do it."

Isaac rested his head down again, closing his eyes like he couldn't stand to see their (probably embarrassing) question filtered through Stiles' opposite of a poker face.

"Stiles do you know anything about true mates?" Scott asked bluntly.

Stiles had to think about it for a few minutes. Yes, of course he'd come across the term in his research on the internet. Everybody and their mother had opinions on werewolves and mates and the full moon and silver, but he's also seen the term vaguely referred to in academically sound volumes in Deaton's library. Admittedly, he didn't know much besides the fact that they could exist, but Stiles hadn't exactly made the reproductive cycle of werewolves his top priority in his research on the subject. For one, he cared more about keeping them alive rather than producing more of them. For another, there are some things that you can't un-know about people you have to see and interact with on a daily basis.

He decided to tread carefully on this one. Obviously in whatever threesome/triad thing Allison, Isaac, and Scott were evolving into the idea of a binary mate/mate dynamic could totally blow that shit up.

"I know that some wolves have true mates and some don't." He checked their reactions to this fact. Neither looked particularly surprised, so he guessed they'd tried to do a bit of research on their own before having to ask him. "I know that they're rare—very rare—as in, like, most wolves don't even have one."

Isaac and Scott both bombarded him with beseeching puppy eyes, like they wanted to know a specific answer to a question they didn't know how to ask.

"Um, I could research it for you, I guess?"

"Thanks, Stiles, that'd be great!" Scott said, like the answer was a good as found.

"Can you guys…" Stiles coughed a bit, not used to being in such an awkward strait. Usually he navigated awkward situations like salmon returning upstream. "Can you guys give me a bit more to go on? Like what exactly are you looking for?"

Isaac and Scott looked at each other again, silently deciding who was going to offer up their questions. Isaac must have lost because a second later he said, "We need to know if we have mates, how to know if you have one and who it is if you do, and um stuff like that." Isaac checked back with Scott to make sure he'd covered everything, and when they'd decided he hadn't missed anything, they both stared up at him with complete trust in his abilities to answer such hard questions.

Stiles saw the two of them tangled up in Derek's king size bed, limbs twisted and hair messy from loose fingers and his heart broke for them. How horrific would it be for them if one of them was Allison's mate, or they were mates, or one of them had a mate that wasn't even in Beacon Hills and it ruined what dynamic they'd grown into against such great odds? It was in these moments when Stiles felt strange. Did any other eighteen year old high schooler ever have to be a father figure for two boys his own age? Neither of them had a father worth looking up to, and Derek wasn't exactly the paternal type. In these precious moments, it somehow became Stiles' job to look after the emotional needs of his pups.

"I want you guys to listen to me, alright?" he began, his voice wavering to his surprise, "no matter what I uncover, you need to know that what you're feeling right now, and what you've felt in the past—those are real emotions that have validity all on their own, okay? It doesn't matter if you all have mates who aren't each other, or none of you have mates, you choose your own destiny and you can choose how you feel. Do you hear me? What you feel for Allison and each other, that's all you guys and you shouldn't let what I find get in the way of what you've worked hard for. Okay?"

Isaac looked like he might cry, and Scott started to rub his head again. "You'll still look, though, right Stiles?"

"I'll always look into anything you ask of me, Isaac. You know that." Stiles sat down on the bed and pulled Isaac into his arms.

As an abused child, Isaac was still touch starved and compounding that with a wolf's natural proclivity for touch, Isaac needed the most physical affirmation. Stiles and Scott sandwiched him on Derek's bed while they comforted him.

"Yeah, I know that. You're the best, Stiles." Stiles met Scott's eyes over Isaac's head and he read the gratitude there easily. It was hard not to be the most important person in Scott's life anymore, but Stiles loved to see the complete adoration on his face. This wasn't Scott ignoring him for sex, this was Scott finding love, sure an unconventional love, but Stiles knew that one day he would find that and Stiles wouldn't be who he turned to for everything. Stiles just wasn't expecting Scott's lifetime love to come this fast.

They continued to cuddle until Derek came back in along with Boyd and Erica.

"What are you doing on my bed?" Derek glared down at them, but Stiles was way too comfortable to consider moving yet.

"What does it look like, doofus? I'm cuddling the shit out of these two pups. Wanna join?"

"No." He turned and walked back into the kitchen.

The door creaked back open a second later when Erica poked her head in. "I want to join. Can I?"

Stiles spoke for the group. "Sure, princess, get in here." He struggled to make room between him and Isaac where her highness could crawl in.

"Boyd," she called once she settled in, "Boyd we're cuddling. Come join us."

He must have said no, because she immediately pouted and even petting her glorious hair wasn't enough to calm her down. "Vernon come cuddle. Don't miss out on this. Scott will make room for you, won't you Scott?"

Scott rolled his eyes and did as she demanded. Before they knew it the five of them were sprawled out on Derek's bed and Derek was back and glaring again.

"As fun as this looks, I still need to take you guys to smell the cougar. We're meeting Lydia and Jackson. No excuses." When no one made a move, Derek's glaring took on a singular focus and Stiles could feel those eyes gouging a line from one eye to the other.

"Okay, kiddos. You heard your dad."

"But Stiles…" someone complained from the middle, really no telling who it was.

"No buts, furry butt. I say that with love. Get out of here. The faster you go, the faster you can come back and watch _Ocean's Eleven_ with me."

They grumbled but did as he said, meandering one by one out of the room. Stiles heard the click of the front door a moment later and if he took a nap in Derek's warm bed while he waited for them to return, well, that was between him and the Egyptian Cotton sheets that Stiles bought Derek as a housewarming gift two months ago.

On the third day of waking up from the same dream, Stiles figured he should probably research just what the hell was going on, but he would have to add it to the bottom of the list of things he needed to research.

At the top of the list was, of course, Scott and Isaac's query on werewolf mates and Stiles intended to spend his Sunday absorbed in his literature. He ate a quick breakfast with his father, renewing his marriage vows to his father's pancakes, got a few extraneous but necessary bits of homework done, and then jumped head first into mates.

For researching, Stiles usually began on the internet. These days most things could be found on the internet. The downside of that, was that _most things could be found on the internet_ but that didn't necessarily make them true. You could find a shitload of stuff on the internet, but that didn't make it right.

The texts were really much better for this kind of thing, but they didn't come with convenient control + F functions that would help one word leap out. Still, he slugged it out on the interwebs for two hours before the fan fiction and the porn got to be a bit too much. When he found himself on the Wikipedia page for knotting, he had to call it quits there for a while.

Stiles made sure his father was away before he opened up his secret chest of werewolf books, dying to try out Lydia's new stash. He'd hate for his father to walk in on him researching in tomes that looked like they came from the Middle Ages, which some did. His father didn't need to see anymore strange behavior from him. As it was, the tension of constantly lying to him had only slightly broken when Stiles had come out as bisexual.

If his father had taken that confession to be the thing that Stiles was hiding away from him, well, Stiles didn't _say_ that, but he wasn't about to correct it.

A light lunch and few hours later, Stiles felt part of his world collapsing around his head.

"Scott," he said to his best friend's voicemail, "get over here as fast as you can."

Fifteen minutes of pacing later and the entire pack showed up at his door with their game faces on.

"Scott! I didn't mean for you to put up the alert, I just found some answers for you."

"Oh," Scott seemed almost disappointed, but Jackson radiated the feeling.

"You mean you just tore me away from a two v two game for no good reason, Stilinski?" Stiles nodded in his shame, his cheeks a light dusty red he was sure.

Erica, Boyd, and Lydia all relaxed from their positions by the car and Stiles adamantly refused to look around to see what Derek was up to. He was so uncomfortable that when he saw the outline of a leather jacket in his peripheral, he turned his entire head around so he could only see Scott.

"Seriously, you all can go home. I need to talk to Scott about some private business, and then we can meet up for Sunday Funday, alright? Sorry about the false alarm."

The rest of the pack left in waves, Cora and Lydia first, dragging Jackson behind them. Lydia commented loudly that now that Jackson's stupid game was over he could join her and Cora for their shopping trip and hold the bags. Jackson looked thrilled.

Erica and Boyd walked off hand in hand towards the closest entrance to the Preserve. Isaac and Allison looked between themselves and Scott, and left quietly at his reassuring nod.

"Stiles, is this about—"

Stiles headed him off before he could finish. "Scott."

"Yeah?"

Derek walked along the front porch until he could no longer be ignored or glanced over, his usual doom and gloom affect in its full glory.

"Not yet, okay?"

"Why not?"

"Derek's still here. You'll want to hear this privately, kay?"

"What's this about, Stiles?" Derek asked him, and wow did it hurt to look at him. Why did he have to be so beautiful?

Stiles felt his heart threaten to speed up, and he clenched down on his self-control. Derek couldn't find out like this, he had to control his heart and control his scent… it all had to do with meditation and shit, right? He just had to clearly not think about it until Derek left. He took a deep, cleansing and calming breath before he manned up.

"Derek, this isn't me trying to step on your toes as alpha, alright? This is Scott and Isaac coming to me with a research question of a personal nature because they didn't feel comfortable enough to go to you or Deaton. I found out their answers, and now I'm going to tell Scott in private. Is that okay with you?" Stiles made sure not to sound too demanding, but like he wasn't about to get walked all over either. He tacked on the request for permission at the end so that Derek's wolf knew that Stiles still saw him as the leader, that he wasn't trying to upstage the alpha.

Derek breathed through his nose a little stronger than usual, trying to use all of his senses to figure out what was going on. He let it go, though. "I hope you can feel comfortable coming to me for these things, Scott, but if you don't then Stiles is a perfectly acceptable alternative. I trust him."

Scott nodded while Derek smiled fondly at him and Stiles gave up all pretenses and melted into goo.

To his surprise and embarrassment, Derek lifted a hand to his cheek. "You're okay," he mumbled, half a question and half a statement.

Luckily for him, Derek didn't wait for an answer but got back into his car and drove off towards town.

"Dude, what's up with your smell?" Scott's nose was scrunched up like Stiles' natural lust smell was revolting to him.

"That's what I wanted to talk to you about!" Stiles felt the panic finally work into his system, he'd been holding it at bay for so long, too long.

"You wanted to talk to me about your hard on for Derek? Ew."

"Ugh, no, Scott. As usual that's only like 5% of it."

"Why is that even any part of it?"

Stiles felt the urge to roll his eyes. Werewolves tended to bring this urge wherever they went. "I looked up mates, okay? You have nothing to worry about, by the way, but it turns out that _I do!_"

"What do you mean?" Scott asked calmly, used to Stiles getting himself worked up.

"True mates are exceedingly rare, right? You know that much. But what we didn't know is that these mates present themselves to their wolves on their eighteenth birthdays. That's how I know you guys are fine. Allison is past eighteen, and wolves also present at eighteen and Isaac is past that."'

"What does _presenting_ mean?" Scott asked with apprehension on his face. "That's not like a sex thing is it?"

"No, Scott, come on. It's just a precursor thing. Like, okay, so when the mate of the intended wolf, that's how they call it in the books, the intended wolf… okay, backing up. How to put this?" Stiles took a quick break to organize his thoughts, tapping his fingers on his chin. Scott knew him well enough to know how hard this was so he didn't ask questions that would just make it harder for Stiles to focus. "So when a wolf is meant like by fate to have a mate, heh that rhymed, when that wolf is _intended_ to have a mate, they are called the intended wolf. A mating between two wolves only has one _intended_ wolf, otherwise the mate of the intended is either the _corresponding _wolf or the _corresponding_ human, are you following?"

Scott's eyes had glazed over a bit. "Yeah, keep going."

"So the corresponding mate or human on their eighteenth birthday starts having these dreams. Did either Isaac or Allison start having repeated dreams after their birthdays?"

"No, they would have mentioned it."

"That's what I thought. So when the corresponding mate turns eighteen, the intended wolf gets a mark."

"What kind of mark?"

"It depends on the person but it appears on the shoulder. It's mean to be bitten in the claiming."

"What?"

"When the two mates find each other and decide to _mate_, like combine souls and shit, the corresponding mate bites the mark of the intended wolf mid coitus—that means sex, Scott—and the mark becomes a link between them or something. None of the books mention what the link entails, exactly, but… it's still a bit worrying."

"Why is it worrying? I mean, you said Isaac, Allison and I don't need to worry about it."

"Yeah, you guys don't. Oh my God, but I do! On my eighteenth birthday I started having the dreams!" Stiles grabbed Scott by the collar of his shirt and shook him around. "Are you seeing why I'm freaking the fuck out?!"

"So you're the corresponding human, then?" Stiles wanted to shake him a bit more but refrained. "Then who's your intended wolf?"

Stiles looked up to the sky, hoping lightning would fall from the sky and strike him dead. "Who do you think, Scott?"

"It better not be Isaac."

"Of course it's not Isaac, Scott, we've been over this."

And then Stiles saw that Scott got it. His ears drooped, and his eyes reflected Stiles' inner turmoil. "Oh." There was only one wolf in the pack who could ever be considered Stiles' match and only one wolf in the pack who wouldn't want Stiles to be his match.

"Yeah, mother fucking _oh_ pretty much sums it up, Scotty."

That was the first Sunday Funday Stiles has missed since its inauguration months back.

-chapter two-

The next two days passed in school and heavy anxiety. Stiles knew he had to be leaking his confusion and nervousness all over his pack, but Scott must have said something to make them back off, because they seemed to quell their nosiness. Lydia, notoriously the worst about this because she didn't understand why she wasn't just told things so she could make the world run smoothly, took Stiles out for curly fries at the only diner in town worth their salt.

The reality of the situation didn't fully hit him until that moment, sitting in Maybelle's with a suspiciously reticent Lydia who kept feeding him curly fries and not judging him. What was he going to do? He'd spent the last two days in a trance, stuck on the thought that the universe, some all-powerful supernatural mother force or something decided that little Derek Hale needed a mate, that he somehow _deserved_ it more than all the other nice wolfies and as some sort of like joke on him, decided to give him Stiles? How the hell did that make sense to anybody?

Seriously, who thought that plan up? Because it sounded suspiciously as bad a plan as Derek would come up with.

In the moment with Scott he couldn't just explain what had happened in these dreams. Yeah, okay, so at first he didn't realize it was Derek in them. Thinking back on it, maybe he could have pinpointed that little fact. He was pretty familiar with his alphas forearms after all, he held him up in a pool for two hours and there wasn't much to look at in that pool. But it just didn't click for him until he realized that these dreams were _real_. Well, real in the sense that the arms were more than like a manifestation of his need for manly cuddles. When his eyes first read about true mates something just _clicked_. The dreams were for the corresponding and they didn't go away until the claiming. Stiles realized then that the only explanation for that meant that he had an intended. What the hell? And Stiles would never know for sure if it was the universe who supplied the answer or his own consciousness, but he immediately knew who his intended was the second he accepted he had an intended. Derek.

The universe decided Derek needed a Stiles.

Stiles could not wrap his mind around the thought that the universe thought _he_ was needed by _Derek_ so bad that they moved mountains to ensure his birth? Like what the hell.

"It's just… I can't understand it, Lyds." He admitted, apropos of nothing on his third batch of Maybelle's finest. She nodded sincerely, for once completely willing to just let him ramble and get it all out. Stiles knew, he _knew_, she would make him suffer her opinion later, but for now she was going to sit and listen to him. The thought struck him that this Lydia really knew him and knew what he needed. For once, in the pack, someone was taking care of him instead of the other way around. Since his evolution to Mother Hen, his friendship with Scott had become less of a minor highway and more of a one way street in a busy city.

"The universe wanted me here so bad that I just sprung up from my mother's womb." She raised an eyebrow, but let him keep talking. "Did you know my parents had a shit ton of fertility issues when they were trying to have me?" She shook her head, her eyes taking on that look the pack got whenever he mentioned his mom and his scent like got sad or something. Lydia didn't even _have_ that great of a sense of smell. Maybe she just picked it up from Jackson via… okay, his thoughts were not going to stray there.

"My mom had like three miscarriages before she got pregnant with me. Like years before she got pregnant with me. Like before Derek would have been born amount of years."

Stiles could tell by Lydia's purposeful blank face that she knew what he was getting at. "So sometime after they gave up, for some reason they decided to give it one last try and this time the universe decided that it would let this last one stick because little baby Derek Hale needed a mate and I popped out nine months later. Bouncing baby boy, the apple of my parents' fucking eyes."

He drained the coke sitting next to him, heretofore untouched in one go and decided it was time to leave. "Let's go. I don't want to think about it anymore. I'm putting it behind me."

"Sure, Stiles," Lydia commented softly, but she put more bills than necessary on the table for Maybelle to collect and placed him delicately in her passenger side.

They rode in silence back to his house, the comfortable kind that came from understanding and Stiles had a maniacal thought that a year ago he would have been out of his fucking mind. This close to Lydia Martin, riding in her car? Sharing a meal and commiseration and like companionable silence that bespoke of deep mutual understanding? If he had time traveled he would think they were like married or something. Now he could only laugh at the vacuum that now existed in his heart. It wasn't enough that Derek Hale made everyone else obsolete, it wasn't enough that his life-long crush on the goddess herself no longer gave him any sort of excitement beyond gratefulness for her shoulder, instead, he had to leave more than a hole in Stiles' heart. He fucking sucked everyone else out to make more room for himself.

And the crux of it was, "He doesn't even want me, Lyds." They sat in his driveway for ten minutes, Lydia's hand holding his with enough pressure to keep him from flying apart. Her perfume sank into her entire car, and Stiles felt it seep into his pores and become part of his scent on a molecular level. Just like Scott and Jackson's lacrosse sweat, Boyd's pancake batter, Cora's double shot latte, Erica's puppies from the humane shelter, Isaac's graveyard dirt, Allison's gun oil, and Derek's alpha-woods-blue?-nature-musk made their homes in his skin, the layer of fat beneath his skin, his very blood and bones—he felt the pack wherever he went. They travelled with him in his body, and any wolf outside of the pack would recognize him as _theirs_.

Reassurance. It was reassurance and love and belonging at every second of the day, and Stiles had never felt less lonely in his life, even when his mother was still alive and his parents took him to the zoo and out for ice cream and to his aunt's house every Christmas.

He could never give that up. He couldn't sacrifice his only true tether to sanity and reality. If Derek didn't want him as his mate, if (when) he rejected him, well, there was no way Stiles was going to leave the pack. Derek would have to get over it and move on. Stiles bulled his way into the pack once, he would surely do it again. Derek had to know that he was here to stay and nothing and no one was going to make him leave this pack. And if they tried that 'you'd be safer if you left' shit that he was sure at least Scott and Derek might try with him, he would just have to summon up all the blackmail material he and Lydia painstakingly collected over the years and use it all in one go because there was no way in hell that he would leave his puppies behind and let Derek take credit for what Stiles carefully, meticulously, lovingly built. No way.

"Thank you for this." Stiles said to his goddess. He slipped his hand out of hers, patted her thigh, kissed her cheek and opened the door. "I'll be fine. I just needed to vent it out to someone."

"I was the best choice, I know. That's why I dragged you along." She smiled serenely at him, her fondness and affection for him lighting up that supermodel face. Once again Past Stiles would have died and Present Stiles only saw a dark humor in the situation.

"You're a gentlewoman and a bad ass bitch and I am, as always, in awe."

"Pack meeting tonight, you know. Take a few hours to pull yourself together and then put on the show of your life, okay? Everything goes back to normal and if he doesn't want you, then he's a fucking idiot and we all will give him shit for it."

"No, Lydia," his voice broke into his command tone, and to his surprise she perked up. Apparently that voice worked on non-wolves too. "No, it's his choice as much as it is mine. I'm not about to fall into his arms this exact second. If you haven't noticed, he's kind of a douche. No one judges him on this, okay? Pass that around when it comes up. _When it comes up_, Lydia, and not because you've forced it to be brought up. Promise?"

She pouted but agreed. "Fine. See you tonight." He closed the door and she powered out of the driveway. Stiles checked for tire tracks before he went inside and flopped himself onto his bed facedown.

Time to man up, Stilinski. Stiles would never admit it to the pack and if they knew he would deny it while poking at their own defensive spots, but it took him over an hour to pull himself together. As far as Stiles knew, he had the advantage here. Derek might not have even noticed his mark yet. God only knew how oblivious he could be about things—he avoided mirrors at all cost, but spent hours building up his muscles, so really it was a toss-up whether or not he saw it. Beyond that, Stiles wasn't even sure how much about true mates Derek knew. He was notoriously bad with knowing werewolf legend. If not for Stiles' research, the new wolves would know nothing about their heritage.

Plan, plan, plan, he needed a plan. A solid plan, or a good enough one to throw himself behind. First things first, there was no point in freaking out until he knew for sure that Derek knew about mates, let alone that his just happened to be Stiles. So, one, watch for confirmation. Two, wait for Derek to broach the subject. Derek was the alpha and it was his job to bring anything like this up between them. He should take the lead on this, Stiles was sure. He was older, he was higher in the pack, he was the intended wolf—it was his place. So until Derek brought it up, Stiles would ignore it. He would do his best to repress his scent and his heartbeat. He would meditate for an hour before meeting up with the pack if he had to.

Finally, three days after his world shattered, Stiles felt like himself again. He was a man with a plan. And he was a man late for a date with the pack.

There was one thing Stiles hadn't factored into his plan and that was Derek's inability to cover himself up and force Stiles to answer awkward questions. Twenty minutes into _10 Things I Hate About You_ (Cora and Erica's choice) Stiles saw it. On Derek's left shoulder, in the crook between his neck and the meat of his shoulder, really more towards the shoulder, a dark circular mark sat mocking Stiles. It was just out in the open, just sitting there! Derek was just like flaunting it to the pack, if any of them besides Scott or Lydia saw it, they'd ask if he got a new tattoo and then Derek would have to explain what it was and then both of them would die of embarrassment. Stiles wanted to avoid this at all cost.

So under the guise of reaching for the uneaten popcorn in Derek's lap, Stiles whispered as quietly as he could, "If you don't want to explain what that mark is, you need to go change shirts. Make an excuse, whatever, I'll cover you."

Derek couldn't fake that level of confuzzlement. Oh shit, Stiles thought, he didn't know. He _didn't know_. And now Stiles out of every person who could have pointed it out had to make his intended wolf know of the mark meant for him, as the corresponding wolf, to claim. What lottery for a free lifetime's supply of awkward situations did Stiles win and where could he give it back?

Derek's head tilted at an odd angle and he tried to get a glimpse of it. "Stop it!" Stiles hissed, so very conscious of the werewolves watching the movie intently. "You'll just draw attention. Go change and look at it in the mirror." He buried his head in his hands, "Oh my God, how do you even."

Derek stalked out of the room, drawing limited attention from the pups. Stiles fumed in the interim. Jackson's nose, more sensitive than the others, started to point in his direction, his eyes not leaving the screen, like his nose was picking up on Stiles' anxiety before his brain could catch up.

He forced his breathing into a calming pattern, determined to keep his panic away from the pack. He already embarrassed Derek privately once, he didn't need Derek to be embarrassed in front of the entire pack too.

Derek came back several minutes later with his leather jacket and a blush. He looked like his world just got rocked. Stiles waited patiently until the movie ended, though he couldn't tell what was happening, and when the credits rolled, he pushed the pack out the door, knowing Derek needed to re-gain his balance. They looked at him with confusion, but obeyed the tone of Stiles' serious pack business voice. When they were all gone, Stiles gathered his keys and as usual softly thanked Derek. His fingers betrayed him on his way to the door, and offered comfort as they brushed the back of the alpha's head on his way to the door. He didn't even register the touch and Stiles opened the door, leaving Derek sitting in the same place on the couch.

Stiles left one horrendous situation and walked straight into another one on the steps down to the parking lot.

Peter Hale gallantly strolled up the side walk like it was he that owned the apartment and not his nephew. This was just not Stiles' day. No, this wasn't Stiles' week.

"Stiles," Peter drawled, "just leaving were you?"

"Obviously, Uncle Creeper." Stiles tried to side step him, but Peter's werewolf reflexes allowed the old wolf to catch him.

"Sure you wouldn't like to stay? Have a drink or something?"

"Um, wow. Fifty shades of no."

"Oh, come on, Stiles. We all know it's not exactly a _hard_ship for you to be around my nephew. What say you? Come keep us company."

"Not in the mood, Peter."

"Well maybe you'd like to get coffee tomorrow, then."

"Look, what's this about? Just cut the bullshit and get straight to it, I can't handle the psycho talk today, okay?"

"Alright, Stiles. Tomorrow at coffee. I'll meet you at the Starbucks on Main after school."

Peter smiled his predator smile and Stiles felt that it should make him feel like a dormouse, but all it did was creep him out and perhaps make his testicles shoot into his body a little bit. Luckily Peter didn't try to prolong the conversation or like kidnap him, or force him to become a werewolf or anything this time.

Stiles suffered through an awkward dinner with his father and Harris' two chapter's worth of homework without complaint. Anything to keep his mind busy and not thinking about this clusterfuck.

Scott called on Skype a little before bedtime, to complain about Allison's family. Stiles listened carefully, like a good bro and a good second in command, but also a little selfishly. He absorbed every word, he asked thoughtful questions, he raised valid counter argument points. By the time Scott hung up, he looked a bit freaked out by how attentive Stiles had been.

That night the dream got more intense. It was like because he knew that Derek now knew they took a step farther into sexy times. Not too far and not far enough all at the same time. Stiles went from being spooned, to spooning Derek and nibbling on his neck. Not a huge change, sure, but enough of a difference that he felt they were going to progress. Derek's confirmed knowledge of his mark and impending mate bond set them down the track, coming up quickly on life's hurdles.

School went by glacially slow the next day. Harris found fault with Stiles' homework even though he was one of three people to actually complete it, Ms. Morrell tried to corner him to talk about pack business, and Cora almost wolfed out again. All in a day's work. Sadly, his impending coffee (not date, ew) appointment with Peter hung over his head and sucked the enjoyment out of the entire day.

When the final bell rang, he buckled himself into the Jeep with the weight of the world on his shoulders. Why was it that the Hale family managed to make him feel hundreds of years old when he had to deal with them? Well, Cora was alright. She could stay.

Stiles wasn't sure what was creepier: the fact that Peter had been there long enough to be on his second coffee, or the fact that he'd ordered Stiles' regular for him. Who was he kidding? Everything about Peter was creepy.

"What do you want, Peter?" He pulled his chair out and sat down, though he didn't intend to stay long enough to get comfortable.

"Hello, Stiles. How was school? Long day?"

"Cut the shit, Creepy McCheapy."

"That's offensive," Peter goaded, "I've never been cheap in my life."

Stiles wondered if his father would get too much flack in the county if his only son committed a homicide/suicide in this Starbucks. Could you really kill someone if they've already been dead before? Stiles leveled him with his best glare, perfected by seeing Derek's and practicing it on the pups when they'd piddled on the carpet. Looking at you, Jackson.

"Fine, if you want to be uncivilized," Peter huffed. "I guess we can just jump headfirst into it. Here's the thing: my nephew is an idiot. You know it, I know it, the pack knows it. So what's the best thing to do?"

"Now wait a second—"

"He is. You can't deny it, Stiles. Don't even try. I've heard you say it more than anyone."

"He's getting better." Stiles was offended on Derek's behalf. He may not be able to be around him right now, but he didn't hate the guy. He was the reason Stiles even got _born_. Hard to hate a guy when the outcome was his life.

"Not fast enough," Peter countered.

"So what, you think you could do better? I seem to remember a lot of chaos and carnage when you were the alpha of Beacon Hills."

"Pssht, of course I could do better. A blind elephant could do better. A human _has done_ better." Peter lifted one hand up and like he was imparting a huge secret, whispered, "That was you, by the way."

"Yeah, I got it, thanks. Your flattery does you no good, here."

"Flattery does well anywhere, and especially with you. It stems from being overlooked for so long."

Stiles had to hand it to Peter, that probably would have been true if he'd said it months ago. But Stiles wasn't a scared, overlooked child anymore. He was second in command of the werewolf pack of Beacon Hills and he single handedly put that pack together. They listened when he spoke, they jumped to follow his orders, and he knew from experience that they would follow him to hell and back. He didn't need fucking flattery these days, he had respect and a shit ton of it.

He felt whatever patience he'd come into this coffee shop with leave him, like an exorcism. "The point, Peter." He took a large gulp of his rapidly cooling coffee.

"The point is this: I would make a better alpha and I intend to be alpha one way or another."

Stiles leveled his eyes at Peter. Why the hell would he give up this information? What was he playing at? Peter was known for playing the puppeteer. He liked to be behind the scenes, making people dance to his games, the Hannibal Lector to Will Graham (and just as evil). Peter didn't straight out ask for things because he had schemes to get what he wanted on his own terms. Maybe he was trying to throw Stiles off by proclaiming his intentions to murder his nephew, but he had to know that Stiles would side with Derek. Didn't he? Stiles could never side against his mate. On like big issues. Like his mate's imminent death.

"Ah yes, I can see the confusion all over that nubile little face."

"Don't call my face nubile. Faces aren't nubile, bodies are nubile."

Peter rolled his eyes, like he thought _he_ was the one who deserved sainthood for this conversation. He continued on, ignoring Stiles' comment like 98% percent of the Beacon Hills population. "There's no need to disrupt the pack any more than is necessary. You will be my second, and I will give you the bite."

"This time you're going to force the bite on me?"

"You lied the last time I offered it to you. This time I won't give you the chance to lie about something we both know you want."

"Times have changed. I only would have wanted the bite to belong to the pack and Scott, but they don't need me to be a wolf to be their second. I'm not going to take the bite, Peter, and I'm definitely not going to help your little coup d'état over my alpha." He grabbed his coffee and stood up, leaning over to impart one last thing to Peter. "Derek did you a favor not letting you fall to omega status. I questioned his judgment then, and I see I was right. That's not really a surprise. He may have been a sucky alpha, but he's loads better now. You need my clout in the pack in order to keep enough of the wolves on your side, I'm not stupid. I know why you've approached me. Too bad for you, though, I don't work with psychopaths. Beacon Hills will always be Hale territory, but it's _Derek_ Hale territory and it will stay that way."

Peter stood up then too, thwarting Stiles' dramatic storm off with a hand on his arm.

"He doesn't deserve your loyalty."

"And you think you do? Take your hand off me." Peter's hand flew off his skin, and Stiles charged his way out of the building, only managing to trip once.

Still running on self-righteousness and fury, Stiles plowed into Derek's apartment ten minutes later with no thought in his head about the awkwardness of the day before. The second he got through the door, he caught sight of Derek watching TV on the couch in the same place he left him yesterday. He'd changed clothes and shaved, but the parallel was already in Stiles' mind. In line with his life philosophy, Stiles ignored it.

"Well, I was right. You owe me like ten dollars, or a coke, or a new identity or something for when I have to skip town."

The Frankenstein still stood in the corner, but some of the cobwebs had disappeared, Stiles noted with disappointment.

"What are you talking about?"

Stiles stalked to the counter in the kitchen, realized he couldn't just _stand there_ and proceeded to pace to the couch, making the trip several times.

"Peter!"

Derek half raised himself from the couch, looking like he was ready to pounce on danger at the drop of a hat. "Peter? What about him?"

"He's officially a red, okay?" Stiles' hands flailed in the air. "He shot straight from yellow to red, we are on RED ALERT, people!"

Derek got off the couch and grabbed Stiles by the shoulder. "Stiles. Calm down and tell me what happened."

Stiles huffed, mad that Derek wasn't already on the same page. He took a deep breath and tried to settle himself. "Deep breaths, come on. Your heartbeat is faster than a rabbit's."

"Please don't compare parts of my anatomy to things you've been known to eat in the wilderness, okay? That creeps a guy out."

Derek took his hands off Stiles' shoulders and poured a glass of water. "Sit," he commanded, pointing to the breakfast bar.

Stiles flopped onto the bar stool and dutifully drank the water his alpha provided. The process of an alpha providing for his pack calmed them both down.

"Yesterday, after I left your place Peter cornered me." He began while watching Derek for his reaction to the mention of yesterday. Derek's emotionless face held up and Stiles was left wanting. "He talked me into getting coffee today after school where he then told me he wanted to be alpha and he was going to do everything he could to make it happen."

Those eyebrows danced over Derek's features. "But, why—"

"Why would he tell that to your second, you mean? Yeah I wondered too. Turns out he wants _me_ as his second."

Derek barked a laugh. "He wants you as more than his second, I should think."

"What?!"

"You call him Uncle Creepy, what do you think I meant?"

"Oh my God! Zombie Uncle Peter _wants me_?" Derek nodded, amusement and disgust battling for dominance over his face. "I think I need a shower. And a toothbrush. And like gallons of lye to soak my body in."

Derek growled. "Did he touch you?" He started sniffing the air, eyeing Stiles' forearm in a telling way.

"No, no, he didn't touch me. We were in public, for one thing. He did call me nubile though, that was revolting."

"So what did you say?"

"Hmm, what?" Stiles fought to focus back on the conversation, his brain making up a dozen different scenarios of things he wished he'd said to Peter.

"What did you say to being his second?" Derek looked vulnerable. It took a second for the expression on his face to register with Stiles because it just wasn't an expression that had ever been there before in Stiles' excellent memory. He found it harrowing and naughty and it forced Stiles to feel a strange sense of responsibility for Derek. He was responsible for this vulnerability, it was his to protect and raise up until it went to college. It was his job to make sure nothing ever happened of this vulnerable moment.

"Derek," Stiles began slowly, careful thought going into how to approach this. "Would I be here if I was going to allow your uncle to kill you for your powers like he killed your sister for hers? You're not my favorite person in the world, but you're definitely my favorite Hale. Well, boy Hale, I don't want to pick a favorite over Cora. She'd be mad."

"Okay." He replied quietly. Derek brought his hands up to rub at his eyes, either causing the redness around them or allowing the redness to blend in. "Okay."

"Hey," Stiles put his fingers on Derek's arm, like he did when Derek wanted to be scented but didn't want to ask. Stiles offered comfort now, in a place he knew Derek was comfortable. "Hey, it's going to be fine, alright? He messed up. He told the wrong person his plans and now we know what he's going to try and we'll be ready for him."

"Yeah, yeah you're right."

"Of course I'm right. That's why you always listen to me."

Derek snorted and Stiles graciously took that as agreement. He moved his fingers up and down on Derek's arm, using his touch to transfer the calm he now ironically felt into his weary alpha.

"Why would he take you from me? It's more than just that he wants you, he told you and came to you for a reason."

Stiles felt a bit awkward. This bordered on the issue they weren't talking about. "I have a theory," he told him, "I think he needs the pack's loyalty to me. The cleanest way for him to take over the pack is to chop off the head and keep the body. If he keeps the neck, that's me, then I think he's hoping that the body won't notice the missing head, or the head transplant. Whatever, you get the analogy." Stiles took his fingers off Derek now that he was looking a bit more like himself. He figured his touch would be unwelcome due to the circumstances, and he didn't want to wait for Derek to ask him to take his hands off Derek's marble body.

"But he's got some false information. He hasn't been around the pack enough to know how we work. He thinks you run the pack like an alpha is supposed to run their pack." Derek didn't take offense to that statement, and Stiles shot off fireworks in his own brain. Alive for another day. "He thinks our pack is like any other pack and they'll respect the alpha because they're the alpha. Little does he know that our pack consists entirely of teenagers who certainly do not respect people just because they should."

"That's true, I'm not sure why I bit so many people with authority issues."

"Well you were high on power, so you can't be held responsible." Stiles filled his glass up with water again. He gestured to the cabinet, silently asking if Derek wanted any. He shook his head and Stiles shrugged. "So what's the plan, my man?"

Stiles inwardly winced. Oooh, not a good idea to call him his man. Time to try to salvage the situation. "What are we going to do about your crazy un-dead uncle?" Smooth recovery, Stilinski.

"First you're going to gather the pack and tell them what's going on."

"Okay, good idea, captain. I'm on board so far." Stiles was like ridiculously proud. It had taken him six months to get Derek to the point where his first priority was to tell the pack what was going on.

"And then I'm going to kill him."

"I like this plan. Simple. Elegant. Easy to remember." Derek didn't crack a smile, but that's okay, Stiles knew he was amused deep down.

Derek looked at him pointedly. "What?"

The pointedness did not go away. Derek looked at him a bit longer before he gave up. "Call the pack, Stiles."

"Oh right, yeah, my bad." He fumbled his phone out of his pocket and dialed Scott.

In an hour, the pack was gathered in their usual spots in Derek's apartment. An hour after that, Derek texted Stiles, _He got away_, and Stiles replied back with a restrained.

The next month flew by with no sign from Peter. Wherever he was, he wasn't on Hale territory anymore so they couldn't actively look for him without upsetting the packs on the other side of their borders. Halloween came and went and with it a bit of Derek and Stiles' old dynamic flared back to life.

Stiles went back to purposefully goading Derek and being generally annoying as shit, and Derek went back to tasteful insults and caveman grunts. It was beautiful. On Halloween, Stiles and the rest of the pack gathered at Derek's house without cementing the plan, and watched a marathon of scary movies. Stiles hadn't felt so close to his mother since her death.

Every few minutes a couple of children would ring the doorbell and Stiles would go vaulting across the room to pile candy into their bags. The rest of the pack let him do his thing with only light teasing.

"Who's giving out candy at your house, Stiles?" Derek asked the second time Stiles crossed the room.

"I just put out a bowl with one of those signs that says take two pieces."

"Those things are bullshit," Jackson said, "everybody takes more than the sign says to take."

"Yeah, but the sign doesn't usually say that the Sheriff of the entire county lives there and will know about it, does it?" Stiles remarked with a smirk. "Kids can be so easy to manipulate. God love 'em."

The leaves around Beacon Hills turned lovely shades of red, gold, and orange, and before the pack knew it, Thanksgiving crawled out of the woodworks.

Stiles knew his place in the pack—he was the emotional center, the common sense, the researcher, and the comforter, but no way in hell was he their mother.

"No, I don't think that's a very good idea," Stiles said when Derek asked him if he was going to cook dinner for Thanksgiving.

"Why not? You're the one who said we should have a pack Thanksgiving this year."

Junior year, the pack hadn't celebrated Thanksgiving together. But, with the growth in their closeness and the _familypackfriends_ vibes that assaulted them every day they were together, Stiles thought it would be nice to have a meal together, even if it wasn't on Thanksgiving but a day before or after.

"I'm going to try to be super sensitive right now, because of past issues, but do you want another residence of yours to burn down? Because that is what will happen if I cook Thanksgiving. Ask Scott. Ask my dad. Bad things happen, I'm just trying to be honest here."

"Okay, so you're no help." Derek looked over the pack as they devoured pizza. "Who's going to do it then?" He said more to himself than to Stiles, like he'd forgotten that Stiles was there now that he couldn't help Derek with his problem.

"Hey! I didn't say I wouldn't help, I just mean don't put me in charge of cooking. I can help plan the menu and shit. I can plan the shit out of a menu." Stiles whined a bit petulantly. He hated not contributing to the pack, being useless hit him right in the chest.

"Great." Derek smiled, actually smiled, though it was bit sinister. "Then you're in charge of getting it done. Delegate help, whatever, I don't care. But if you want a meal, it's on you."

"Damn it." Stiles walked right into that one. "You didn't have to trick me, dude. That was low."

That sinister smile grew into a real smile, and oh hot damn. Stiles had to adjust his collar. And he was wearing a t-shirt so that looked a bit ridiculous. He needed to get away. Now.

"Okay, yeah, I'm in charge, cool. Better start now, huh? Yeah, I'm going to start now." He backed away slowly, clamping down on his heartbeat, sure he was leaking arousal. Shit. Shitshitshit. A month of being careful and he lost it over a smile? If Derek had somehow had an accidental dick slip or something, Stiles could see how he'd lose his mind over that, but a smile? God, he was pathetic. "Boyd! Boyd, you're with me."

Boyd perked up at his second using the serious business voice, and didn't even ask any stupid questions while he followed Stiles out the door and to his jeep.

"Where are we going?"

"My house. We have to plan the Thanksgiving menu and figure shit out."

Boyd, swear to God, lit up. He loved cooking. Stiles wasn't sure why Derek thought Stiles would want to cook anyway when Boyd would do it willingly and like with pleasure. Stiles made a note to himself to make sure Derek knew basic facts about his betas, like their hobbies and general personalities.

"Number one priority," Boyd said, raising a finger, "we have to have a kick ass turkey."

Stiles cocked a grin at his new favorite. "I knew I picked the right beta for this."

Several days later, Stiles knew this to be a fact of the universe. You couldn't create matter or energy, you couldn't destroy matter or energy, and Boyd was for sure the best beta in the kitchen.

Boyd cooked a mean turkey. If it wasn't weird and slightly straying into bestiality, Stiles would describe watching Boyd prepare a turkey as akin to a man making sweet, sweet love to his soul mate. It was beautiful, awe-inspiring, really.

Stiles peeled potatoes until his fingers felt like they were going to fall off, and Erica sat next to him peeling carrots while they made fun of the rest of the pack who were Boyd's bitches for the day.

Stiles imagined buying everyone "Boyd's Bitches" t-shirts and making them wear them next year and decided, yes, that was a thing they needed to make happen. Erica agreed. Stiles checked one point off his Christmas list.

They cooked two turkeys, and both took for-fucking-ever to cook. Werewolf noses were a definite disadvantage in this case and Stiles spent the best part of the day helping Boyd smack their hands away from the food in the kitchen. When Derek tried to grab a chunk of meat off the bone before dinner was served, Stiles read the hesitancy in Boyd's eyes and slapped Derek's hand out of the way for him.

Derek growled and his eyes flashed red. The room went silent in sudden tension. Stiles rolled his eyes. "Oh, stop growling, Sourwolf. Yes, you get to eat first, but not until it's _ready_. So shut up and turn your eyes off, you're freaking out the pups."

Derek flushed in embarrassment. He mumbled an apology to everyone and calmly asked Boyd what else needed to be done for dinner to be ready.

"Um, the table needs to be set? You could have someone set the table," Boyd said to his alpha, his wolf's uneasiness with issuing him orders written all over his strong jawed face.

One of those behemoth eyebrows raised, and Derek flashed it on his pack. Stiles was not going to put up with that shit, though. "You heard him, Derek. Go set the table. Everyone else has jobs already, even if they're simply to stay out of the kitchen. We all learned the hard way what happens when Cora tries to microwave something."

"Hey!" Cora protested, but giggling along with everyone else.

Derek stared Stiles down for a minute, but he must have seen Stiles' firm resolve because he walked over to the drawer with silver wear and began to count out forks and knives.

"Cora," Stiles called, "since you're a terror in the kitchen, help your brother set the table. Water glasses, plates, the whole shebang."

Cora started to protest, the inherent need to whine when told to do something involving housework. Stiles cut her off before she began. "You'll be excused from dishes."

"Alright!" She used wolfy powers to speed to the cabinet with the plates and started to count them out.

Stiles barked out orders to the rest of the pack, with a careful look for permission from Derek. Boyd, Erica, and Stiles had no clean up duties since they cooked, and Boyd got first dibs on dessert. Jackson, Scott, Isaac, and Derek were on clearing and cleaning duty while Allison and Lydia were going to wash and dry. Stiles put Lydia nominally in charge, knowing she was likely to put herself in charge anyway.

Scott, Isaac, and Allison were off in their own world on "their" couch in front of the TV so Stiles just had to assume they would catch on when the time came. Jackson would make them aware of their duties anyway, Stiles could always count on his little douchnozzle to be a douche.

Finally, _finally_, it was time to eat and Stiles sent a quick thank you to his mom, fondly recalling his earliest Thanksgivings and how utterly amazing she made them. Boyd's prowess reminded him painfully of his competent mother. Thinking of her, Stiles realized they needed to take a moment. Stiles was about to make them all say what they were thankful for, when Derek surprised him.

Just as he was to eat his first bite, allowing the rest to begin, Derek stopped with the fork centimeters from his mouth.

"Aww, man!" Scott cried, just as Jackson on the other side of the table whined, "Nooo!"

Their alpha ignored them while he glared at his bite of turkey. He seemed torn for several minutes, but came to a decision. He looked up, and met the eyes of all his pack-mates and settled on Stiles. "I think," he began, his voice oddly hoarse. "I think we should say what we're thankful for. We did that in my family," his gaze drifted to his sister and he looked older than his twenty-five years, "and I think I'd like to continue that tradition. With family."

Stiles, to Derek's right as his second, recovered quickly on the pack's behalf. "I think that's a wonderful idea, Derek. I'll start, huh? Okay, well, I'm thankful for my dad as always. But for these last few years, I'm thankful that Scott and I aren't alone anymore. I have people who care about me," Stiles looked to all of them, his heart swelling, "people who fight for me," he nodded to Scott, "and people who fight with me." His wandering eyes caught Derek's and Stiles looked away quickly. "I'm so glad to have you guys. You've uh… you've given my life purpose."

Lydia wiped a tear away from her cheek. Lydia. Lydia of all people. Stiles took a second to be proud of himself.

Boyd went next, followed by Erica, Isaac, Jackson, Cora, Allison, and Scott. They all had their individual things to be thankful for, their families, their things (Jackson), their significant others, but every single one of them were thankful for the pack and Stiles' already swollen heart took a leaf out of the Grinch's book and grew two sizes.

When it was Derek's turn, he looked wrecked. He looked like he might not even be able to say anything. Under the table, Stiles grabbed his hand. If there was a time when a grown man who happened to be an alpha of a werewolf pack and had his family burned around him in his childhood years needed comfort, it was now.

To Derek's credit, he composed himself nicely. His voice didn't break when he spoke. He squeezed the daylight out of Stiles' hand, but it couldn't be read in his voice. "I am thankful for my family." He nodded to each of them, "and I'm thankful for my little sister. Cora, I thought you were dead. You show me that there are still miracles in the world and that not everything is destined to fail. Thank you."

He then took an exaggeratedly large bite of turkey and the pack let out a collective laugh and dove in as well. Stiles waited an extra minute. He was just as hungry as his werewolf brethren, but his hand burned where Derek still held it.

And what did that mean? Stiles expected him to drop it as soon as he was done with his speech, but he kept right on eating and he still had a death grip on Stiles' hand. It was like he had forgotten about it.

Five minutes went by with Stiles wondering whether he should take his hand back or risk embarrassing Derek. Either way, it was going to be embarrassing for them. Stiles waited until Erica made a rather rambunctious comment and the pack dithered loudly in disagreement and he seized his moment. He squeezed Derek's hand, and then slipped it out of the strong grip. Out of the corner of Stiles' eye he could see Derek blush a bit. No one else was looking so no one else saw it.

Other than that blip, Thanksgiving was a smashing success and Boyd was named King of the Kitchen. Stiles made a note to get that on a t-shirt as well.

Trust Peter Hale to set the universe back in balance. After a pleasant Halloween and Thanksgiving without his presence, the alpha wannabe reappeared on the scene.

Stiles and Allison were hanging out at Lydia's place when Derek called Stiles' phone. The girls didn't pause _Clueless_, but they weren't subtle about eavesdropping.

"Hey what's up?"

"Stiles," Derek's voice came out angrily from the phone. More angry than usual. That was his something is up voice. "I caught Peter's scent out by the Depot. Where are you now?"

"I'm with Allison and Lydia at Lydia's. Who do you want with you?"

"The three and Jackson."

"Argents?"

"Information, don't engage."

"Got it. Be safe."

Stiles hung up without waiting for the answer that wasn't going to come. Lydia and Allison stood at attention, ready to follow whatever orders came from the alpha. And wow, Stiles was proud, because getting the humans to follow alpha orders as easily as a wolf had been tough—especially these two, Lydia the world's most notorious meddler and manipulator, and Allison the huntress with the training and prejudice and the angst.

And they chose to put their lives in his hands. Scary stuff.

"Allison," He addressed her first, eager to get her on the road, "Derek caught Peter's scent out by the old Depot. Let your father know Peter's here and might be a threat. Don't let him out to hunt, though. Stay there and watch him. Capice?"

"Got it, bravo leader," she replied mostly serious and was out the door before Stiles could think of a witty rejoinder.

Lydia already had her phone in her hand, calling Jackson. She raised an eyebrow, waiting to relay Jackson's orders.

"He wants Jackson's nose with him. Depot, ASAP."

Stiles tuned out Lydia's conversation with her boyfriend while he flipped through his contacts starting with Boyd. He directed the three original betas off to Derek by the Depot, and then called Scott for good measure, to keep him on alert. But Scott was with Isaac at Derek's and already knew by then.

Lastly, Stiles called Cora and told her to watch over the apartment, Peter knew where it was and he knew how important it was to the pack. Stiles thought it unlikely that Peter would show up there, but he also knew Derek wouldn't want Cora to have to hunt her uncle so he gave her an easy assignment.

When Stiles and Lydia had been sitting in tense silence for ten minutes, Stiles got a text message. The alert tipped him off that he wasn't going to like the message, because he already knew he didn't like the messenger.

Stiles was a big believer in personalized ring tones, _stilized _ring tones, he liked to say. And only one person was awful enough to warrant a nails screeching on a blackboard ring tone. He felt a knot form in his stomach. He knew then that Derek and the betas weren't going to find his uncle. Peter left that trail deliberately for him to find, to throw them off.

He checked his phone, finally, and what he saw made him gasp.

"What? Stiles, what is it?" Lydia demanded to know. But he couldn't tell her. She couldn't know.

If he put on a fake grin, Lydia would know. She couldn't read heartbeats or smell emotions, but she was damn observant and she _knew_ Stiles. He learned how to lie from werewolves, though, and if you could lie to a werewolf successfully, then you could lie to the smartest girl in California.

So he chose to let his panic bleed through. "I got to go."

"Where are you going? What's going on? Is someone hurt?"

He rubbed his hand over her head, smoothing her hair down from where wrestling with Allison on the bed had roughed it up. "Everything's okay. Well, mostly everything's okay, but I have to go check on my dad. I have a bad feeling about this. Stay here, Jackson will come straight here after this is over, and he'll need to know you're okay."

"But—"

"It's fine, Lyds. Trust me."

Her eyes were screaming murder at him, but even Lydia was susceptible to the serious business voice. It was like Stiles' superpower. She eventually nodded and Stiles booked it out of her floral room, down the steps, into his car, and across town to the old Hale House.

Parking the car, with his heart in his throat, he checked the text again.

_If you want to see your father alive again, come alone to the old house. If I catch a whiff of anyone not you, I'll slice his throat. DX_

Attached was a picture of his father, his mouth bound with duct tape, looking defiantly at the camera. Stiles' stomach felt like a troll was battering around in it, and maybe stomping the skulls of his enemies or something.

Rarely did Stiles get this scared these days. He ran with a werewolf pack, he issued commands, he debated strategy about how to best kill supernatural creatures and then he watched those strategies get carried out and things die! He and his research were directly responsible for the deaths of pixies, fairies, omega wolves, and various other creatures. Their deaths sat heavily on his marred soul, and he slept like a baby at night because those things challenged his pack's territory. They came to cause harm to people he cared about, fuck it, people he _loved_. They could rot in hell and when some unlucky creature eventually got Stiles, he'd gladly meet them there if it meant his pack lived longer.

Stiles' dad was his original pack, would always be pack. Isaac once told Stiles that his father's scent was so prevalent on him, that he wasn't even sure what Stiles actually smelled like as just him. And Stiles was so weird that that information comforted him.

Peter was going to come into their territory and drag his _dad_ into this life? That was not fucking okay with Stiles, not okay at all.

Stiles composed himself, took a deep breath and raised a steady hand up to eye level. If it was shaking, so was his resolve. Steady as a rock.

He walked to the door, knowing Peter would have heard the Jeep from miles away. Stiles hoped he wouldn't have to use the wolfsbane in his pocket or the silver knife in his ankle holster, but a small part of him hoped he would. He wanted to rip Peter apart for this. If Stiles had been a wolf, he'd storm in, claws extended, fangs drooly, and he'd put Peter back in his grave faster than Boyd could flip a pancake.

"Quit dawdling and come in." Peter called from a room to the left of the foyer. The room he slaughtered Kate Argent in. Truly, the only good deed they'd ever gotten out of Peter Hale.

"Where is he?" Stiles cut to the chase.

He heard growling and a muffled shout that he interpreted as his father screaming at him to get out. A piece of Stiles' heart chipped, but he walked farther in, closer to the noise. His heartbeat was beyond control. It was loud even to his own ears, pounding in his eardrums.

"We're in here. Come, join us." Stiles turned the corner and saw his worst night mare.

Foolishly Stiles let out a strangled, "Dad!" and tried to leap to his aid. Peter's claws, dangerously caressing his father's neck, crept closer in his nervousness, so Stiles abandoned the effort. He couldn't afford to make Peter any more uncomfortable. All it took was one slip of his hand.

He felt his face shift into determination and his anger overwhelm any lingering panic. Stiles was not going to allow this.

"What do you want, Peter?" Never had Stiles' voice sounded so fierce, so primal. He almost sounded like the werewolves he babysat.

Peter proved his psychopathic tendencies when he smiled mischievously at Stiles' implied threat. "You know what I want. Help me take out Derek, help me keep the pack, and I'll let him live."

Stiles couldn't help but snort. "You thought kidnapping my dad was going to make me help you? Are you delusional? You know what? Don't answer that, you obviously are."

"You are going to help me, Stiles."

"Wow, no, I'm really not." Peter's false bravado melted, his eyes leaked frustration. "And if you think killing my father is going to endear you to the pack, then you're crazier than I thought."

Stiles felt the balance shift, Peter's frustration wasn't helping him. The power flew over to Stiles. "You're losing your touch, Peter," Stiles taunted the older man.

For a second, Stiles thought Peter was going to do it, he thought he was going to kill his father, and Stiles reacted.

"Stop!" He ordered, the serious business voice echoing into the dreary house. To both of their surprise, Peter's hand didn't move.

"Let him go." Peter dropped the Sheriff.

The voice was working. He could order Peter around? Why was Peter listening to him? Peter went into full out panic mode. His plan wasn't going how he thought it would. Well, this wasn't exactly how Stiles thought this would go either. He thought that at least one Stilinski would be dead after this encounter. He'd hoped it'd be him over his father. More people needed his dad.

"Cut him loose, and then step away. You will not hurt us." Peter actively fought not to carry out the order, his hands shook in a way that werewolves' hands weren't capable of and he full out grunted from the strain of standing still.

To Stiles' surprise, the order won out and Peter carefully retracted the tape from his father's mouth and cut the bindings around his hands and ankles with a claw. As for the 'step away' part of the order, Peter took that and ran with it. Literally. After he released the Sheriff, he jumped out the closest window, and did a forward flip onto the ground below, hitting the ground running. Stiles peeked through the window and saw Peter run off into the woods. They were safe.

Stiles ran over to his father. "Dad! Are you okay?" He didn't wait for an answer, he began running his hands all over him, searching for any injuries.

"I'm fine, I'm good."

"Did he touch you?"

"Besides the restraints?" His dad asked wryly, stretching his arms from the awkward position they'd been held in for no telling how long.

"He's pretty bad about the bad touch thing. You're sure you aren't hurt?"

His father didn't deign to answer again. "Stiles, what the hell is going on?" He sounded weary, older than his fifty-five years. Stiles hung his head in shame. He'd meant for his father to stay out of this. He was never supposed to be introduced to this life, to things he couldn't protect his town and his family from. Stiles was supposed to protect him from this. And he'd failed.

His father had been a victim. Peter would have and could have ripped his throat out. The only thing that stopped him was Stiles' order, which still made no sense. Seriously, why had Peter been forced to obey him? Based on his reaction to the order, he hadn't known he'd have to do it either. The first order, Peter had just done it before he'd thought about it. And when Stiles demanded he release his dad, Peter actively fought it and lost. This was some weird mojo.

"I'll tell you, Dad. Promise. Give me a second to make some calls."

"Make some calls?! You need to make some calls? Who the hell are you calling?"

Stiles smirked, pulling out his phone. "The Ghostbusters." He clicked on Derek's name. "That'd be funnier if we'd actually fought a ghost, I guess."

His father mouthed _what_ but Derek was already answering and Stiles' attention was now on his alpha.

"Yeah?"

"He was at the old house, heading west. Held my dad hostage, everything's fine. Gotta tell him now, though. Talk later."

"Gotcha." And that was the entire conversation.

"Now are you going to tell me—' Stiles held up one finger, intent on his next call.

"Scott? Buddy, code red and blue."

"What?"

"Code siren?"

"What? Stiles!"

The Sheriff looked up at the burnt husk of a ceiling, resigned that his son would always be his son no matter what weird crap he'd gotten into.

"Peter took my dad. He's fine. Get your mom to meet us at my house, okay? If she's at work, tell her to do anything she can to leave, alright? This is an emergency."

"Ohhh," Scott said, impervious to the last thing Stiles just said, "red and blue. Siren. Your dad, okay clever. Got it."

Stiles sighed. "Do you need me to repeat it, Scotty?"

"My mom, your house. On it."

"Thanks, dude. Oh, and bring Allison?"

"Sure. Anything for you and your dad. Twenty minutes."

Stiles hung up, relieved that if they were going to do this thing, it'd at least be done right.

"Stiles. For the love of God, what is happening?"

Stiles made full eye contact with his dad then, and it felt strange. He wasn't looking at his dad just as his son, but as a leader of the local werewolf pack to the leader of the human police force. He'd hoped he'd never have to drag his dad into this, but the pragmatist part of him knew that it was inevitable. Still, he wished this could happen years from now and not today.

"This is what we're going to do, Dad," Stiles told him sternly, but respectfully, "you and I are going to drive home without talking about this, we're going to wait for Scott, Allison, and probably Derek, and then I'm going to explain what's been going on—today, last year, ever since the animal attacks, okay? That's the game plan. You can ask all you want, but I'm not going to say anything until we're home with the McCalls."

"What are you talking abou—"

"Lives are at stake other than ours, okay? And it's not really my secret to tell."

The Sheriff looked like he was going to argue, but his shoulders slumped and he capitulated. "Taking orders from my teenage son. What's wrong with this picture?"

"Don't feel bad, Dad. A lot of people are taking orders from me, these days."

His dad shot him a look. Guess that didn't make him feel better.

On the very, very quiet ride back to the Stilinski house, Derek called.

"Did you catch him? Please tell me you caught him."

Stiles could hear Derek growl through the phone. That was never a good sign.

"So you didn't catch him? Dammit."

"No," Derek said, like he still had some fangs that sound waves had to bend around. "He has some kind of herbs or something to mask his scent. Is that possible? I thought only alphas can mask their scent."

"I'll look into it, dude, but he has about forty years on me in that department, so…" Stiles' dad was shaking his head, beyond confused and obviously not amused to be on the outside.

"Fine."

Stiles shot a glance at his dad in the passenger seat. "If you're done out there, swing by my place. I could use your help."

"Ten minutes out."

"See you then," Stiles said. With no imminent emergency, he had the luxury of goodbyes.

"Who was that?"

"Well well, aren't we Mr. Questions today, huh?"

"Stiles."

"You'll see, Dad." And in a more serious tone, he added, "no more questions 'til we get home."

"You haven't even answered those." The Sheriff sounded like a petulant little child, and in any other set of circumstances, it would make Stiles laugh. As it was, it just made the situation worse.

"I said I wouldn't. I'm a man of my word."

His father didn't bother to answer, he just stared out his window looking like he wanted to be anywhere but in his son's jeep. That kind of hurt, to be honest, but it's not like Stiles was avoiding this exact scenario because he couldn't handle how awesome it was going to be. This was going to suck every step of the way and Stiles was strong enough and mature enough now that he didn't mind if his dad was mad at him or whatever as long as he was safe.

Scott and Allison beat them to the house. Stiles steered his dad inside, sitting him at the table. They had about five minutes until their fearless alpha arrived, so Stiles poured his dad a whisky, thought about it for a careful minute, and poured himself one too.

If they were going to have an adult conversation, then Stiles was going to take full advantage of that.

His dad glared, but since it wasn't backed by luminous red eyes and a threat, it rolled off his back like water off a duck.

Scott and Allison knew better than to say anything until Stiles started speaking, so they flitted about the periphery of the room. To be honest, he wasn't paying much attention to them. Three minutes earlier than planned, Derek Hale opened the door without knocking.

Stiles looked up, and smiled. "Oh my God, I am so freaking proud right now."

Derek did not look amused. "Look at my little alpha, all grown up and using doors. He's like a new man."

"Stiles." No one else could say Stiles' name like that—like a curse and a prayer and a warning and a caress all in one syllable. A shudder ran down Stiles' spine, and he quickly re-grouped.

"Right, well, the gang's here. Let's begin. Scott, how far out is your mom?"

"She said she needed an hour like, what, a half hour ago? I think she'll be here soon."

Stiles nodded, taking the information in. "We mostly need her for clean-up duties, anyway. We'll start without her."

"Melissa McCall is in on _this_? Whatever this is?"

"And what do you think this is, Sheriff?" Derek spoke from just inside the door, his arms crossed and his face emotionless but for a small frown.

"A cult? I don't know, you tell me. Stiles mentioned the animal attacks, Peter Hale attacked me and was going to slit my throat with his fingernails, so I have no fucking clue, okay? Nothing makes sense."

"Well, Dad," Stiles cut in before Derek the Deadpan could reveal the big secret with his insensitive delivery. "Beacon Hills has a bit of a furry problem."

"What like that fetish where people dress up?"

A laugh busted out of Stiles like a cannon. There were times, man, when he was so happy this was his dad. Dad rarely said things like this, but it was proof that Stiles came by his foot in mouth syndrome honestly.

The rest of the room was not as amused. Or at all amused. "No, but God that's hilarious."

"Then what did you mean?"

"Werewolves," Derek said, probably because he thought Stiles might try some roundabout way again and he saw it as his duty to just get it out. Derek the Deadpan struck again. "Beacon Hills has been home to werewolves for centuries."

"Werewolves." His dad said, incredulous. "You want me to believe that werewolves are behind everything that's been happening these last two years?"

"Kanimas were a thing, too," Scott put in helpfully. Stiles shook his head.

"Thanks, buddy." Scott preened with the praise. "It's not a lie. Derek Hale is the last of his family of werewolves. Well, sort of. Derek?"

The alpha took his cue with more grace than usual. One second he was a male model, and the next he was a snarling werewolf with no eyebrows and sadly just as much sex appeal in Stiles' mind.

The Sheriff's jaw dropped. Stiles wasn't even sure that was a thing that could happen to people, let alone his dad. He recovered quickly, though, to his credit.

"So. Werewolves. Go on, explain." So Stiles did with the help of Scott who'd been there along the way, and Derek who could talk about his family who knew the Stilinskis before the fire, and Allison who explained about hunters and her family.

Stilinskis, Stiles decided, were above all, adaptable creatures. His father took all the information in, asking questions rarely but when necessary for better clarity, and he just… he listened to Stiles' pack.

"You called Derek the alpha earlier? So he's in charge?"

Scott giggled a little, but he was the one to answer. "Yeah, he's the alpha because he has red eyes, and he's like stronger and stuff. But Stiles mostly does the planning of what we need to do and he takes care of us, so. But Stiles is the second! And he's human. It's rare."

Scott's pride in Stiles' achievements in the werewolf world was a bit ridiculous, but it was so _Scott_ that Stiles didn't fight the modest little smile. He slashed a hand in front of his face, like aw shucks.

Melissa McCall pulled up in record time, and with the backing of an actual human adult, the Sheriff started to calm down a little bit.

With Scott's mom's help they gave out the rest of the pertinent information, who was in the pack, how long all this had been going on, ect, and then everyone else left, leaving Stiles alone with his dad. He didn't want to be apart from him now, not when his father was so new to this and Stiles couldn't gage how he was coping with everything. This rocked the amazing relationship they'd built over his lifetime, through grief and mild alcoholism and ADHD and bisexuality. Stiles just… he didn't want to be told to go away. He wanted to sit with his dad, breathe the same air, make sure his dad still loved him. Nothing was as important as his dad loving him and loving his dad. That was his baseline, his factory setting.

"C'mon, kiddo. Let's watch a movie, yeah?"

Stiles beamed. That was a good sign. "_Die Hard_?"

"I'm ordering pizza too. With sausage and pepperoni. And maybe extra cheese."

"Only because you had a traumatic experience. Don't think this is going to be a daily thing, mister. You need to watch your cholesterol, and if you're not going to do it, then I will. I'll be like the _Big Brother_ of your arteries, okay? I've got their number."

His dad looked suitably chastised, and then a bit greedy when he ordered the illicit pizza. They were back on track. All was well in the Stilinski residence.

Later that night after three movies, Stiles walked into his room to see Derek asleep on his bed. This was new.

"Derek," he said while he opened the second drawer down in his dresser, grabbing clean underwear. "Derek, wake up."

The alpha's eyes opened. "You took forever," he said as an apology and a complaint. "We need to talk."

"Are you going to break up with me?"

"What?"

"Nevermind. Look, let me go brush my teeth and get ready for bed and we'll talk, okay? It's been a long day and I want to go to sleep."

Derek jerked his head and Stiles took that as agreement. Stiles took lot of weird ticks as agreement when it came to Derek.

When he walked back into the room, Derek had moved to the desk, which was probably for the best. Stiles didn't need to think about Derek falling asleep in his bed, sitting on his bed, doing anything in his bed, really. That way laid madness. Stiles really wished Derek would quit breaking into his room. Eventually he was going to walk in on Super-Secret Stiles time and it was going to be awkward all around. As it was, Stiles was almost too paranoid to really be able to enjoy it.

Like he had enough to deal with, being the tailor made mate to a Norse god. Next to Derek, Stiles was young, inexperienced, _pale_, annoying. If he were mates with himself he wouldn't want him either. What a sucky life Derek has had, his family dead, his uncle undead but super murdery, a second rate mate. Stiles felt bad for the guy.

"What happened with Peter earlier?" Derek cut straight to the point.

Stiles appreciated that, and he bit out the story with as many facts as he could. "He just like had to listen to me, Derek, it was the weirdest thing."

Derek didn't look confused. "Of course he did."

"What? What do you mean 'of course he did?' What the hell does that mean?"

Derek rubbed his temples, like Stiles was the one who was so bad at conversations he got headaches. Cute. "You're second and he's still part of the pack until he actively attacks me."

Stiles ran his hands through his hair, no doubt leaving it sticking up in funny places. "You mean his wolf thinks I'm higher than him and has to be obey me?" Stiles tried to wrap his head around this new information. He loved new information, he soaked it up like a sponge. He had it on good authority that it was freaky. "Like the wolves have to obey the alpha?"

"It's not exactly like that."

"Yeah, I bet, since I'm not the alpha as you like to remind me all the time."

Derek rolled his eyes and looked a bit more pained than usual. "You're my second, and to be honest, with how differently we run the pack, you're more like co-alpha, alright?" Stiles felt his eyes open wide enough to make him resemble an anime character. "You don't get to say that to anyone besides me."

"No no nonono, what? I'm like co-alpha and I don't even get to brag about it?! Not fair, dude."

"You aren't co-alpha."

"But you just said—"

"I said you're _like_ co-alpha, not that you are." Derek was blushing. Why was Derek blushing about this, Stiles wondered. He was probably embarrassed that some teenage kid was his co-alpha.

"That's… basically the same thing."

"No it's not."

"There is literally no difference between those two statements."

"You aren't co-alpha, but you are second." Derek's voice got louder. "Even if you aren't a werewolf, Peter's wolf, along with the others, recognizes you as being higher in the pack hierarchy than him. His wolf has to obey you as long as he's in the pack."

"Peter will have figured that out. We can't count on that next time he attacks, and trust me, he'll attack again."

Derek stood up from the desk, lifted the window open. "I know. And Stiles?" Those indescribable green eyes stared directly into his soul and Stiles ached.

"Yeah?"

"I do trust you. I just wanted you to know."

"I do know. Thank you Derek, I trust you too." Derek smiled like a schoolgirl, like Stiles had given him some huge gift. "But you owe me a new window lock. It's been like two years, dude."

Derek stood there, holding the window open. "I like being able to get in anytime I want."

Stiles liked that too, honestly. "Dude, you already broke it once. Pretty sure there's nothing keeping you out." His words were a little harsh, but Stiles tried to put all his devotion in his tone. Did Derek understand he wasn't talking about the window lock?

Derek already broke his way into Stiles' heart, there was literally nothing standing in his way but himself. Stiles was still waiting for Derek to bring it up. He was the alpha, it had to be him.

"If you really wanted it fixed, you'd have done it yourself."

True, Stiles thought. Derek, with all his gross werewolf grace, jumped out the window abruptly, and Stiles went to sleep that night with a huge weight off his chest.

- Chapter Three -

The days between Thanksgiving and Winter break dwindled, until suddenly it was the last day of the semester and Stiles had a wild Lydia pestering him all day. What a turnaround from recent years, Lydia Martin chasing him down the hallway, begging him to listen.

"But Stiiiiiles!" She whined. Lydia wasn't usually a whiner. She was more of a manipulator and blackmailer. She must still not have anything on Stiles. She knew about the whole thing with Derek, but Stiles knew she would never use that against him. She would, however, use his place as second to her advantage.

"Ask him yourself. Or have Jackson do it."

"Derek would never go for it if Jackson is the one to bring it up."

"That's not my problem. That sounds like your problem. And maybe Jackson's."

"Why do you hate me? Why can't I have nice things, Stiles?"

That had to be a ploy, she was trying to provoke him. The most annoying thing he could do would be to ignore her. Which is what he did.

Not one to give up easily, archaic Latin came to mind, Lydia followed him down the hall all the way to the cafeteria. She sat on his right, the seat usually reserved for Scott and continued to plead her case while the rest of the pack sauntered in to join them for lunch.

"Jackson's parents' place is so nice. There's a hot tub, and skiing, and beautiful mountains," she was saying just as Boyd and Erica walked up.

"What's this?" Erica asked.

"Nothing, Princess," Stiles said just as Lydia replied, "I want to take the pack to Jackson Hole for a week over the break."

"Oooh!" Erica squealed. "I want to go! Oh my God, can we?" She turned those huge eyes on Stiles, asking for permission.

"It's not my decision," he said, stuffing his leftover and cold lasagna into his mouth.

The three of them laughed, even Boyd. Stiles was regretting those "Boyd's Bitches" t-shirts he'd just ordered in the mail. "Et tu, Boyd?"

"Of course it's up to you, Stiles," Erica said like this was a fact that everyone knew.

He took another bite of lasagna and swallowed it too quickly. "It's up to Derek, you know that."

Boyd scoffed. "Yeah, but Derek will agree if you bring it up."

"What? No he won't. If he doesn't want to do it, he won't. It's as simple as that."

"Oh, baby," Lydia cooed, pinching Stiles' cheek. Not appreciated. "He can't say no to your sad Stiles face. He hates disappointing you more than we do."

Hold the phone. "What?" Seriously, what the hell? Sad Stiles face? That better not be a thing in the pack that they talked about behind his back, like how Jackson and Stiles had a running tally of puppy points of who looks the most puppyish. Spoiler: it was Isaac. It was always Isaac. The real fun was betting on who was in second.

"It's true," Erica put in helpfully while she ate her apple. Erica and apples, popping boners around the BHHS cafeteria since 2011. "You're like his Kryptonite."

God damn Erica and her comic book references that made it impossible to stay mad at her. Lydia took over the conversation from there. "Look, do _you_ want to go skiing over the break?"

Stiles had a rather hysterical image of himself falling all over his face skiing and he thought he'd rather not, but Lydia looked way too excited about this and he'd hate to disappoint the pack. God, Stiles thought to himself, he was going to be one of those parents who let their kids have anything, wasn't he?

"I mean, I guess?"

Lydia beamed, the sun goddess. "Then bring it up with Derek. Jackson's parents have the cabin the last week of the break, but they can't go now because Mr. Whittemore's case got moved up so he has to be in court."

"I'll talk to the rest of the pack and see how they feel." He tried to level a strict look on them, but could see he failed miserably. "And then I'll talk to Derek, okay? But not until everyone agrees."

"Fair enough," Lydia smirked, sure she'd already won. She probably had, Stiles conceded.

Predictably, the rest of the pack wanted to go and just as predictably, Stiles found himself prepping for an argument with Derek after school. This was the problem with all the betas being in high school, Stiles thought meanly, they made his job so much harder and so much more embarrassing.

He drove the jeep straight to Derek's favorite training meadow after school. The rest of the pack was meeting there to continue their training, Lydia and Allison set up to knock some arrows around while the wolves wrestled. Derek had Cora teaching a sub unit on how to identify different natural plants native to the Beacon Hills area. Scott, Boyd, and Isaac were moderate students.

Stiles, the last to arrive due to an unfair detention because of stick Harris, walked around to where Derek was taking on Erica and Jackson at the same time and waited. He loved the grace the werewolves fought with—they used their movements to push them forward, converting energy used against them into a counter attack. It didn't used to be this way, Stiles remembered with a shudder. Stiles could remember how awful they all were those first few weeks. Jackson was not the most natural fighter, but he was the most willing to work hard. Erica had a way of moving that would embarrass a cat and a way of predicting where the next blow would land. If any of the betas could win against Derek, it would be these two in tandem. Somehow, to Stiles' amusement, Erica and Jackson were the most complementary fighters in the entire pack.

Not even Cora and Derek combined could move as seamlessly as the blondes. And they were raised fighting together and had the most experience, though to be fair they had some formative years apart. But still.

Derek must be training himself, Stiles figured. He wouldn't go against these two unless he wanted to challenge himself. Stiles sat back and watched the fight, wishing he had some popcorn or a drink or something. If Michael Bay could capture this fight, he wouldn't need so many explosions.

Fifteen minutes into the fight, Jackson called for a break to take his shirt off. Erica pulled hers off too, clad in just her sports bra. She shot Stiles a smirk, obviously remembering that unfortunate day when his hormones got the best of him. Stiles blushed and stuck his tongue out at her. Screw Erica and her gravity defying boobs of perfection. Normally at this point Derek would have taken his shirt off too. Stiles' blush deepened. Derek couldn't take his shirt off because then everyone would see the mark. Stiles' mark. The mark meant for Stiles to bite mid-coitus.

Erica took a swig of water and her smirk deepened, looking at him questioningly. She pushed her boobs out a bit more, and Stiles wanted to die of humiliation. If she wanted to think the arousal leaking from his pores was for her boobs, Stiles was glad to let her think that.

"Oh get over yourself, Reyes," He snarled. Jackson pulled her back into the fight before she could retaliate.

An hour before the sun would set, and this was the winter so it wasn't that long, Stiles asked Derek if they were almost done. He couldn't exactly call training off, that was Derek's call, but he could ask.

The pack must have known what Stiles was getting at, because suddenly they all _had_ to be at home for dinner, or do homework, or do chores that they'd been neglecting all week. Really, the meadow cleared in under five minutes so that Stiles could coerce Derek into taking the pack on vacation. The things he did for his pups.

"That was suspicious," Derek remarked.

"They have a vested interest in letting me talk to you alone, so no, it's not that suspicious."

His alpha gathered all the miscellaneous materials that somehow got left behind, a water bottle, three arrows, someone's hoodie that Stiles had seen about three different pack members wearing before so there was no telling who it actually belonged to.

"What do they want?"

"It's your blunt nature I like best, I think," Stiles spoke before thinking. He kept talking, to distract Derek, "Lydia wants the pack to go to Jackson's parents place in Wyoming to go skiing for a week over the break."

"And do you want to go?"

What was up with that? Derek was asking if Stiles wanted to go. Was Boyd right about Derek not wanting to disappoint his second? Maybe he wouldn't cancel the "Boyd's Bitches" t-shirts after all.

Stiles learned a long time ago to be honest with Derek. Or as honest as possible. "It's important to the pack. I talked to everyone, and they're all really excited." Stiles played with the ends off string on his red hoodie. "They made me talk to you, I'm not really sure why, though, you never have any problem saying no to me."

Derek laughed. "Yeah, but you also never have any problem hearing 'yes' when I say 'no,' so I bet they were counting on that."

"Yeah, probably," Stiles was not going to bring up the theory about Stiles' sad face. "So how about it? Are we going to go?"

The trunk to the Camaro opened, and Derek put all the collected junk in it, the pack's unofficial lost and found. "How bad do they want to go?"

"Pretty bad. Lydia already has a driving schedule written on color coded notecards."

Derek didn't say anything, and suddenly it was really important to Stiles that they go on this trip. When was the last time Derek would have been on vacation? When he lived in New York? Before that? Derek needed a break, and he'd never be able to get one if he left the pack, he'd worry too much about leaving them with no alpha. And then there was Cora. Has Cora ever been on vacation? Stiles doubted the Hale family left Beacon Hills like ever. They had territory to protect, they couldn't afford to leave. Yeah, the pack needed this. Lydia was right and he would never hear the end of it.

Stiles put a hand on Derek's arm, cementing his smell onto his alpha. "I don't think Isaac has ever been on a family vacation," Stiles spoke, putting his ace on the table. Isaac using his puppy eyes was cheating and the whole pack knew it, but using Isaac as an argument was just as bad because it was so effective. "He could use some good memories, I think."

Derek's shoulders slumped and Stiles knew he'd won. He felt powerful, needed. "Alright. Have Lydia get all the details and put out an itinerary. She probably already has one, God." Derek looked pained. "This is either going to be the worst vacation ever, or the second worst vacation ever."

"That sounds like a story."

"If it gets worse than _that_, I'll tell you the story so you know how much worse it could be." Derek smiled at him, and they shared a total moment. Stiles laughed with him.

"Fair enough, dude." Stiles walked back to his jeep, planning dinner with his dad in his mind. They could have pasta, but did they have enough vegetables to make that good for them? "I'll let the pack know. See you later."

Derek waved, and Stiles saw him get into his own car in the rearview mirror.

Two days after Christmas, the pack piled into two cars and were on the road for Jackson Hole, Wyoming. Stiles drove his car, with Isaac, Scott, and Allison piled into the back seat, stuck in their own world where rainbows and butterflies were commonplace things. Derek rode shotgun, and after the first hour of monosyllabic answers, Stiles gave up on conversation and just started babbling about anything and everything.

If Derek wanted him to stop, he just had to say something. Contrarily, Stiles saw his facial expressions change based on the topic Stiles was on. He was amused when Stiles lectured on the history of male circumcision. Totally amused, like tried to hide his smile and everything. Derek got a bit tense when Stiles started talking about his dad's current cases, so Stiles verbally wandered off that path and onto another.

Three hours into their thirteen hour drive, they stopped for lunch. The triad in the backseat didn't even notice, which was pretty sad.

"Scott." He called, "Isaac? My beautiful huntress? We've arrived at lunch. You guys coming in or what?"

They deigned to eat with the pack. Lydia and Jackson, driving with Boyd, Erica, and Cora, met them at McDonald's and they spent a loud meal together. Soon enough, they were back on the road, except this time Derek started talking back. The alpha and his second spent a comfortable ride to Jackson Hole together, learning things about each other that they hadn't needed to know in emergency situations.

Before this, Stiles could give a run down on Derek's strengths and weaknesses in fighting that bordered on creepy. He could recount with complete accuracy the number of swipes in one fight alone, and he often forced Derek to listen to his opinions on how to get better, faster, and smarter in a fight. But he couldn't tell you what he liked to do in his downtime. Or where he went grocery shopping.

Derek liked milk. He went through a whole gallon on his own in a week. He liked Chinese food, but not Vietnamese. He took long walks/runs in the Preserve while the pack was in school, with the result that he knew every inch and every smell of his territory. His mother taught him that an alpha who didn't know their territory wouldn't be able to keep it and Derek took that seriously.

They stopped again for dinner, and afterwards this time, Derek drove. Stiles let his mind drift a bit, listening to Derek talk about his family. Stiles knew Derek just needed to talk about it sometimes, that he needed someone else to hear and to know so that it wasn't just he, Cora, and Peter who knew what the Hales were like. Stiles was happy to be that person. If listening would keep that smile on his beautiful face, Stiles would listen to Derek tell the same stories over and over again. They were wildly entertaining anyway. Laura sounded like a real character. Of all his family, Derek missed her the most, and Stiles wished he could have met her, not just the top half of her rotting body.

Thirteen grueling hours after they left Beacon Hills, the pack pulled up at the nicest cabin Stiles had ever seen, in real life or on TV. And he'd seen a lot of TV. If this building was technically a cabin, then Stiles supposed he lived in a hovel. And Derek lived in a tree. Maybe a bush.

Jackson's parents were unsurprisingly loaded. No one was surprised, except that they were. Living in Beacon Hills, not the biggest or nicest town, but not a run-down place either, people just didn't have this level of opulent wealth. Stiles' house, Lydia's house, even Scott's house were some of the nicest in the county. The Hale place, in its hay day, was the crown jewel of Beacon Hills and Stiles suspected that the only reason the county hadn't followed through on its threat to condemn it was because the people still remembered it in their minds and hearts as the nicest building in town.

Regardless, Stiles' jaw dropped upon pulling up the gated drive. He drove the jeep up around the circular drive, parking in front of the front door and the five of them piled out.

Lydia and Jackson, in front of them, fled into the house while Boyd seemed to draw the short straw and had to carry their bags, Jackson with just slightly less baggage than Lydia.

He sighed but dutifully held his head high. Boyd was probably the only person in the pack who would have born such a thing with no complaint. Stiles knew he would get his own back. Boyd was sneaky as hell and more vindictive than he looked. He was the type to wait, months even sometimes, and he let the tension build. He let whoever wronged him wait until they forgot about his revenge, and then piled hell on them at the most inconvenient time for his enemies. Stiles knew this from experience, but he was so thrilled at Boyd not being a pushover, that he was more amused than enraged.

The pack followed Lydia inside, all eager to claim rooms. Scott, Isaac, and Allison were eyeing each other like everyone else didn't know they'd want to all share. Stiles mentally assigned them the master bedroom, if it was a king it'd be big enough.

The triad grabbed their bags off the top of the pile in the trunk, and Stiles moved to grab his own when a hand shot out and crossed his chest, stopping him in his tracks.

"Derek, what the hell, man? All the good rooms are going to be taken and I'll be stuck sleeping on the end of Scott's bed again."

"Again?"

"Long fucking story, okay? Can we not right now?"

Stiles started to move toward his bag again, but the steel of Derek's arm didn't bend. "Derek!" Stiles whined.

"You and I have to make a little trip."

"Is this going to be like a trip down memory lane, because we just did that. For like, ten hours, so I think we're good there."

"No, idiot." Derek's patience wore thin. Stiles always knew when his patience was wearing thin. When the state of Stiles' pristine neck was in question, he kept tabs on the people's moods who were most likely to savage it. They were past that point by now, still, that information didn't just atrophy in the brain. "When an alpha enters another pack's territory, he has to present himself to the alpha whose territory he's entering."

"Oh my God," Stiles said, completely forgetting about werewolf territory wars. How could he have forgotten about that? If some random pack entered their territory and said they were just on vacation, the pack would freak the fuck out. Would this pack be any different? They had to know they were on prime vacation land and that thousands of people a year came and went through their lands. "Is it going to be okay? What if we have to leave? The alpha won't like kill us, will they? We don't have a great track record with alphas other than you. Or you, actually, like, all cards on the table, but you know that."

"Stiles," Derek breathed deeply through his mouth, "shut up, please."

"Yeah, right, fair enough."

"I emailed the alpha, she's an old friend of the family. They know we're coming, this is just a formality."

"You emailed? Oh my God, you have like a working email address? Can I have it, because I want to send you _all_ the grumpy cat videos. Are you signed up for free coupons from red box? Because we watch a shit ton of movies and that could really help you out."

"For the love of God, shut up. Why are you suddenly so talkative? You were fine in the car."

"What can I say, I'm excited. We're here, things are happening. I'm coming alive, stop bringing me down, man."

"Well, get back in the car."

"Thirteen hours, Derek. Thirteen! I'm done with the car today. Why can't you just go by yourself?" He made a vague shooing motion in Derek's direction. "You're the alpha. You tell us like every day."

Derek pushed him back to the driver's side of the car, herding him unabashedly like a sheepdog. Stiles graciously kept this comparison to himself.

"I haven't seen the Beckett pack since I was fourteen," He explained, now pushing Stiles behind the wheel. "She didn't even believe that I was now alpha of Hale territory, so I thought it would help if I brought at least my second with me. To show I so sort of know how these things work."

"So you're saying we can't screw this up?"

Derek slid into the passenger seat and buckled his seat belt a little too hard. "I'm saying I'd appreciate it if we didn't screw this up. If any pack was going to be an ally to us, it'd be this pack. We like the Becketts and we want them to like us."

"The 'so don't screw this up, Stiles' was totally implied in that, you know that, right?"

The corner of Derek's mouth crooked up before he turned serious. "There's a reason I chose you to be my second, Stiles. You won't screw up."

Stiles took great pleasure in Derek's words. The pack bond that was usually so light to him as a human zinged with electricity. His alpha was pleased with him and proud of him.

Stiles chose not to acknowledge Derek's words, knowing that it would make him uncomfortable. Full disclosure, it would make them both uncomfortable.

He turned the engine over, and looked to Derek. "Do you know how to get there?"

"Take a left out of the driveway."

The Beckett pack's den was a quick ten mile drive away. Stiles and Derek took a few wrong turns, Derek running on memory from a decade ago, but they got there eventually. Stiles pulled into the driveway, about twenty minutes outside of the town proper.

Derek's head turned toward the building. He eyed Stiles, and their silent communication kicked in. Derek nodded once, quickly. They were coming.

A young werewolf, early twenties and built like a house, came out the door and directed them to park. Then they followed him inside, jaws dropping. They walked into the house, not as nice as Jackson's place, but much more lived in. This was a home, and it was clear. People lived there, people thrived there.

They followed the wolf into the foyer, down a hall way and into a large sitting room a few doors down. Stiles' first thought upon entering the room was simply 'red.' The walls were painted blood red. Stiles' second thought was that there was no way that was actual blood because real blood would have turned a rusty brown color. What a comforting thought.

A large woman sat in the center of the room. Her long red hair had a few streaks of grey in it, but she was easily one of the most beautiful women Stiles had ever seen. Though, he had to concede, maybe he was just partial to red hair.

That blasted voice in his head that refused to just shut the hell up already whispered that he wasn't partial _only_ to red hair: black hair and green eyes and scruffy faces and bulgy muscles and an ass as tight as a drum…

He coughed. Derek stood a foot in front of him, as he should as alpha. Stiles took his cue, remaining a little to his right and not making direct eye contact with the woman who was obviously alpha.

As visiting alpha, Derek spoke first as the woman rose to her feet. "Alpha Beckett," He said, voice full of respect. "Thank you for allowing us in your territory."

"Alpha Hale," She obviously recognized him. "Call me Linda, please. And who is this?"

Stiles took a micro step closer, baring his neck just enough to show respect. Derek visibly relaxed. "This is my second, Stiles."

"Your second, huh, Derek?"

The smile that fell over Derek's face made him look like a little boy. It was quite adorable, Stiles thought.

"But he's human."

Stiles took a little offense to that. He would be more upset if he didn't regularly allow his humanity to make the pack's enemies underestimate him. Several times they'd been saved because some omega wolf thought he wasn't worth worrying about. It balanced out all the times an enemy tried to use him as the pack's weak link, a weakness they could exploit.

Still, Stiles took pride in his abilities as Derek's second. His wolves and even the human members of the pack respected him. They knew his worth and he was tired of having to prove himself to every wolf they met.

As annoyed as Stiles got about things like this, Derek was even worse. He took more offense to disparaging comments about his pack than he did about himself. And people who picked on Stiles often found themselves on the business end of his fangs.

"He's human, yes." Derek replied tightly, "but he's also my second."

"No offense meant, Derek, of course."

Derek only nodded, his shoulders tight with tension. Stiles had a feeling that if he didn't need to be on the good side of this Linda woman, Derek would have reacted way differently.

Stiles felt the need to intercede. He'd been introduced and now it wouldn't interrupt any important werewolf codes if he spoke. "I'm perfectly competent, I assure you Alpha Beckett."

The alpha looked wearily at him, not convinced at all, but she let it go. Probably for Derek's sake more than for Stiles'. Whatever, as long as it got her to shut up about his humanity and keep Derek calm.

"Yes, Second Stiles, I'm quite sure you are." She took a step closer to them. No, a step closer to the _door_ and motioned for them to follow. "Will you join us for a meal? My mate has been preparing a roast for your visit. Do you eat meat, Stiles?"

Stiles had to guffaw. It was a character flaw, and it was better than some of the first things that popped into his mind. "Yes, Alpha Beckett. I live around werewolves, sometimes I think I eat more meat than anything else."

"Potatoes." Derek said in response to that. "Preferably curly." And Stiles supposed he had a point.

Alpha Beckett ushered them out of what Stiles had dubbed the Red Room and they made their way to what he was now going to call the Room of Death. Large animal heads were mounted on the walls of the formal dining room, as proof of the prowess of the pack—their strength as hunters. A large ten point buck hung directly behind the head of the long mahogany table, and Stiles felt Derek's discomfort as surely as he felt his own.

This room was a typical trophy room for a werewolf pack, Stiles knew this from extensive research. Most normal packs liked to show off their strength to any would-be competitors and allies—to prove themselves mighty. As far as Stiles could tell, the Beckett pack was pretty mighty.

The dead eyes watching them from the walls creeped Stiles out, though. He didn't like seeing these slaughtered animals. In his pack, any accidental hunting was used properly. Every single bit of the beast was used and eaten by the member who accidentally killed it as recompense to the creature, to show respect for nature, and to discourage the pack from killing needlessly.

Stiles found himself thinking that his pack must be like the weirdo hippie pack or something compared to all the traditional packs. Other packs must make fun of them, saying they wore like the equivalent of werewolf hemp and didn't bathe for like weeks or something. They could say whatever they wanted as far as Stiles was concerned. They hadn't come across a threat they couldn't neutralize yet, knock on wood.

Alpha Beckett sat at the head of the table and motioned for Derek to sit at the other end, across from her, as an honored guest and fellow alpha. Stiles assumed he was to sit to Derek's right and was quickly reprimanded when he pulled the chair back to sit down.

"My daughter Gabriella will sit to Derek's right, if you don't mind Stiles," She said from across the room and with no room in her tone for an actual suggestion. She spoke like she was used to her word being law, and Stiles guessed she was rather correct about that seeing as how a wolf who looked eerily like the older woman was sitting in the chair he held out before he could even process her words.

"Uh, sure thing. I mean, yes Alpha Beckett. Where would you like me to sit?"

But this wasn't right. He knew that. The alpha's second _always_ sat to the right of their alpha, unless the alpha had a mate and then the second sat to the left. But Stiles was both! It was his _right_ to sit by Derek's side. Still, Derek had asked him not to mess this up and he wasn't going to let him down. He secretly hoped all these wolves smelt his displeasure, though.

"You may sit to his left." Stiles didn't like this. He looked to Derek, making sure to be seen confirming the order with his own alpha. He may have to follow her rules in her own house, but his alpha's word was law to him. Not hers.

Derek nodded, but he didn't look thrilled either. The woman next to him didn't seem to find anything amiss with the situation and tried to cajole Derek into conversation before the rest of the Beckett pack joined them at the table.

Stiles sat stiffly in his seat, spending all his energy trying to control his heartbeat and weirdly focused on his posture. He would not be cowed by these people. Alpha Beckett, fucking Linda, had already insulted him twice and Stiles always considered himself a bit of a baseball guy. Three strikes, lady. One more and…

The rest of the pack gathered, and Alpha Beckett ate the first bite, followed by Derek, and finally everyone could eat the delicious roast provided by _Larry_, Alpha Beckett's pretty chill mate. He didn't have the weird intensity about him that his mate did.

Stiles ate with no emotion on his face or out in the air. He focused solely on cutting his meat, putting it in his mouth, chewing, and then swallowing. He kept an ear on Derek, but was lost to his own world.

Gabriella was still talking at Derek. At. Derek was barely responding, and Stiles secretly took great pleasure in that. The pack spoke amongst each other, Stiles paid no attention to them, but Gabriella's infuriating voice prickled at his nerves. When she reached out a hand to touch Derek, Stiles accidentally on purpose scraped his knife across the plate, making it screech loudly. Werewolves hated that.

"Oh, sorry," he said, looking up to eight pairs of ears covered with hands in various states of claw-y.

Gabriella went right back to her one sided conversation. Stiles peeked over to his right at Derek who was looking straight down at his plate. She kept talking and talking. Stiles almost found the situation amusing, if it were anyone other than Derek, he would find the situation amusing. As it was, some bitch was putting her hands on his mate and Stiles didn't fucking like that. The only amusing thing now was that he hadn't ever considered himself a possessive guy before and Derek wasn't even technically his.

By dessert, Stiles started to read between the lines: the alpha's dislike of him and surprise at his arrival, the dinner invitation that booked no arguments, the delicately placed hand of the alpha's daughter on his mate…

"Oh my God," Stiles spoke out of nowhere, "Oh my God, you're trying to set Derek up with your daughter!"

Derek looked to him in panic, but Stiles couldn't tell if it was because of his rude exclamation, or if it was the prospect of this woman hitting on him. Possibly and probably both.

Gabriella looked mortified. "Mother!"

Alpha Beckett tried to gain control over the confused cacklings amongst the wolves. "Stiles," she said tightly and bit fangy, "that is not your place to worry about."

"Like hell," he replied. Somewhere in his mind an umpire was shouting _Strike Three_ in a voice that sounded like a mix between his father and his favorite baseball announcer. "You're trying to set my alpha up with a wolf from another pack. That's against the conduct rules."

"The rules don't apply to you, _boy_."

"I swear to God, if you talk to me like I'm stupid again…" he trailed off at the growls from the surrounding wolves. Probably best not to threaten the alpha of the pack whose territory they were in. "Look, the rules don't apply to me? Yeah, you're right. They don't. But him," he pointed to Derek, "and you? Yeah, the rules apply there. You don't get to pressure him into anything just because we need to be in your territory for a week."

"And you don't get to come into my territory and tell me what to do, human."

Derek stood up so fast, the table shot forward a few feet. He dragged Stiles up and behind him. "Thank you for a wonderful meal, Alpha Beckett," Derek said formally and way more composed than Stiles felt. "We should be going."

"He's spoken for!" Stiles shouted, locked in a staring contest with his new nemesis.

Derek's breathing sped up. Alpha Beckett walked around the table to them, not giving an inch in their locked gazes. "He is not spoken for, he has no mate. He is free to choose whomever he wants. If he so happens to want my Gabriella, well… So be it."

Stiles' blood boiled in anger. He saw red, his hands clenched without his consent. The only reason he wasn't attacking this woman was Derek's strong arm around his chest, holding him back. Derek's arm couldn't contain his words. "He is an _intended_." Stiles spat out at the woman. Literally, he saw some spit fly from his mouth.

Her demeanor changed, her eyes softening in shock. Stiles counted that as a win in his column on the whole staring contest thing. "No," she said, "surely not. That hasn't happened in centuries."

Stiles snorted meanly, "Believe it, sister."

"It's true." Derek said, still an annoyingly calm presence behind him. Stiles felt rather than saw him pull his free arm up to show the mark.

Alpha Beckett scrutinized it closely, her betas looking on in awe. "But you aren't claimed," she pointed out. "Perhaps one of my pack is your mate. Did you not think of that, Second Stiles?"

She spoke mockingly to Stiles but it was Derek who responded. "I know who my mate is, Linda." The use of her first name calmed her down.

"But she hasn't claimed you." Alpha Beckett shook her head, clearly not getting it. Stiles wondered again for the hundredth time why werewolves were always so black and white. See your mate? Mark your mate. Mate is mate is mate.

"And that is absolutely none of your business." Derek's façade finally started to slip. "Now, this has been a dramatic meeting and we've been travelling all day. So, thanks for the meal and allowing us to stay in your territory. We'll be gone soon. Stiles, let's go."

He didn't need to be told twice. They left the building quickly, Stiles a step behind his alpha and neither of them speaking. They got back into the jeep and still weren't speaking.

Halfway back to the house, the silence remained. Stiles vibrated with the need to say something, but he just couldn't. He'd ruined Derek's alliance with the Beckett pack and he knew it. He couldn't speak first, he could barely get a read on Derek. He didn't seem too upset, but Stiles kept thinking back to the car ride over and his humble request that they not mess it up. And Stiles messed it up. He messed it up like a four year old coloring on walls.

"So that went well," Derek finally said as they were pulling into the driveway again.

"Pretty sure that's my line, dude."

"Well, you weren't saying it." Stiles shrugged and they went inside to their pack. _Home,_ Stiles thought to himself. It wasn't the house he grew up in, it was these people. If his dad was here, he'd be complete.

"You can grab the bags for putting me through that," Stiles joked, knowing in his heart now that they were okay and they weren't going to talk about this.

"You can grab the bags for being an idiot." Derek muttered, but he was already out of the car and opening the trunk.

"Dude, if I had werewolf strength I'd be lifting everything and you know it. Sadly, I'm just a weak, puny little human who can't possibly—"

Derek's fist grabbed a handful of Stiles' shirt and suddenly Derek's face was directly in front of his, their noses a centimeter apart. "Don't do that."

What the hell? Derek's eyes were seriously intense right now, an eerie red and burning. "Don't do what?"

"Don't say you're weak because you're a human. You know that's bullshit more than anyone else."

Stiles opened his mouth to reply, but words failed him. "I—Well, I—You don't—"

"You're the strongest member of this pack, Stiles. You're the heart and soul and we're only as strong as you are. So don't say you're weak. Don't even joke about it."

Derek didn't wait for a reply, he threw Stiles to the ground, picked up both bags and strode into the house to greet his betas.

Stiles pulled himself up, a little dazed, and followed him inside. The pack was unsurpringly watching a movie. The front door opened up next to the room with the TV and seven heads turned in their direction, flashing smiles and greetings.

"Lydia, where should I put our bags?"

Lydia got off the couch, leaving a hole between Jackson and Scott who looked disgusted at being near one another. "Well, Jackson and I are in Jackson's room, the view is the best there."

"Of course it is," Stiles said fondly.

Lydia continued like she wasn't rudely interrupted. "Allison, Scott, and Isaac are in the master," Stiles congratulated himself on calling that. "Erica and Boyd are in the downstairs room. Derek, you're in the queen sized with the attached bathroom, and Stiles and Cora are in the room next to you."

Sharing with Cora? Stiles could be down with that. Cora was an excellent cuddler, Stiles thought it came from being a born wolf who grew up in huge puppy piles and then was denied those piles for years.

"No," Derek said, his eyes flashing red again. He must really be on edge to lose control twice in the last five minutes. Stiles did suppose he'd had a long day—thirteen hour car ride, talking about his feelings concerning his dead family, tense dinner and uncomfortable confessions, ect.

"What's wrong?" Lydia asked, almost offended.

Derek took a deep breath, visibly trying to calm himself. The red faded out of his jade eyes and his face relaxed. "An eighteen year old boy is not sleeping in the same bed as my _little sister_, Lydia."

Now Lydia actually was offended. "And why not, Derek? They're pack-mates and it's not like either of them are into the other."

"She's my little sister and he's my," Derek only hesitated for a second, his hiccup noticed only by Lydia and Stiles, "second. He's my second. My little sister cannot sleep with my second."

"Then where the hell are we going to put him? Are you going to make him sleep on the couch?"

Derek looked pained. More so than usual, even. Stiles would interject in this conversation that was obviously about him, but really he had no idea what to say. He didn't mind sleeping in the same bed as Cora, or any of the pack really. He'd even slept with Jackson one time that they promised not to talk about and that wasn't so bad.

Still, Derek didn't often get to play the big brother card. Cora had done all her growing up without him, and Stiles couldn't begrudge him the chance to be over protective of the sister he'd long thought dead. Shit, Stiles himself was more overprotective of Cora than her actual brother was.

Cora didn't really look interested in the conversation at all, Stiles noticed when he looked to her like why the hell are they talking about us? She just shrugged and went back to the movie, a sparkle in her eye that hinted she knew more than him. The smirk she fought down corroborated that thought.

Screw Hales.

"He can sleep with me." Whoa, big bad alpha of stoic-hood say what?

"Wait, what?"

Derek ignored him and brought the bags over to the staircase. Lydia looked thrilled once Derek had turned enough not to see her. Stupid meddling Lydia. Ugh, he told her not to meddle!

"No, seriously, what?" Derek took the first step, still blatantly ignoring him. "Really, Derek? Okay, cool, man. Thanks for my consideration."

That made Derek hesitate. "Stiles, would you rather sleep in my room or on the couch?"

"Duh, your room. But I just wanted a say in my own sleeping arrangement, okay? God."

Stiles wasn't sure if this was better or worse than sleeping with the other Hale. Being that close to Derek would be heaven in hell wrapped up in purgatory. Stiles wasn't sure that made sense. To be fair, though, his brain was stuck on _"He can sleep with me."_

"I'm going to bed. Everybody be ready to hit the slopes at 9:00 tomorrow, alright?"

The pack grumbled, none of them eager to spark Derek's short temper at the moment and their alpha disappeared up the stairs, carrying his and Stiles' bags. Scott shuffled his fingers through Isaac's hair, their puppy always the most sensitive to Derek's dark moods thanks to his asshole dad.

Stiles graciously allowed Derek an hour to get to sleep before he joined him. This was going to be awkward enough. He slipped into their room and headed straight for the bathroom. Derek had left a nightlight on in the bathroom, and Stiles appreciated that. Not everybody had night vision and Stiles liked that Derek didn't forget that. Derek didn't forget that he was _human_ and he didn't see it as a weakness.

Honestly, Stiles had given it very little thought as to why Derek had never offered him the bite. His uncle was eager enough to have Stiles as his beta—his second, even. His mind avoided the huge can of _statutory_ worms. Derek hadn't ever made Stiles feel like less for being a human in a pack of werewolves. Before Stiles had put the pack together he'd been a bit of a dick, for sure. He could still be a dick. But Stiles rather took Derek's dickish behavior to mean that they were equals. The alpha didn't talk down to him, didn't condescend to him. They'd worked out a system for danger—Stiles didn't interrupt the fight even if he thought he could change something, but Derek didn't tell him to stay away, either. Derek didn't forbid him from going along with the pack, he didn't dictate what he could tell his own father about the supernatural world. He respected Stiles, and Stiles was grateful for that respect and reflected it.

He'd been up too many hours today, thinking like he was. Better not to think about today. He quickly brushed his teeth and played around with the frankly ginormous shower, eager to test it out the next day, and then he stripped to his boxers. He didn't feel particularly embarrassed about it. In a werewolf pack, nudity was a thing that inevitably happened and often at that. Before the mark, Derek was nude more than anyone due to full alpha stuff. Quickly Stiles got used to giving up modesty, and furthermore, werewolves were like furnaces, he knew from experience with sleeping over at Scott's. He kind of pitied Allison for sleeping with two werewolves, she was probably constantly too hot.

He'd rather take his clothes off before he got to the bed, than have to be in bed and then take them off. That felt weirder, for some reason. It seemed more presumptuous, like he expected something if he started stripping in bed.

Whatever. Stiles knew he was overthinking this, but he couldn't stifle the nerves. Derek took up the whole right side of the queen mattress. Stiles folded back the covers to the left side, put his phone on the nightstand and slithered into the bed, the corners of the sheets tucked too tightly under the mattress to provide much room for the movement of two grown men.

He thought it would take forever to get to sleep, being so close to something he wanted so badly, but before he could even turn over once, he was asleep.

The dream that night was more intense than usual. He'd gotten so used to the chaste dream of spooning Derek, nuzzling his tattoo, biting at his mark. This time, however, the dream went…farther. It still started with him behind Derek, but in this dream, Derek spun in his arms, meeting his lips, pushing their hard bodies together. Derek bit his lips and his knee traveled upwards, pushing its way between Stiles' thighs, just brushing his erection when—Stiles woke up sweating. Stiles woke up sweating and hard and staring straight into Derek's open eyes.

The "Shit," came out involuntarily. He scrambled back, knowing, _just knowing,_ Derek could smell his boner and know what had happened, that Derek had gotten him that way. Ugh this was all Derek's fucking fault.

He bolted out of the bed, trying to keep his back to the bed as he ran for the bathroom. Derek didn't need a view of his hard-on if he wasn't going to do anything about it.

He whipped the door closed behind him and then stared at the room. Now what was he supposed to do? He could shower, but he'd left his clothes in the room. He'd have to walk out in a towel, which could be just as bad. And his erection was not flagging like at all. He was going to deal with this with Derek in just the next room. God, it was horrible enough that every werewolf in the house would know what he was doing, but on top of that Derek was going to know exactly what Stiles was thinking about.

What the fuck, Stiles decided. Derek already admitted to knowing they were mates. If he didn't want Stiles to jack off to him, then he'd have to fucking man up and say something about it, wouldn't he? He doesn't control Stiles' jerk off sessions (though he did seem to have control over Stiles' dick).

"I'm gonna shower now so all nosey werewolves need to turn their ears off, okay? Thank you, this has been your second speaking and thank you for flying Air Stiles."

There, they'd been warned. If they happened to hear him, well, that was their own damn fault at this point.

Stiles went for it. He stepped into the glorious shower and soaped himself up. The suds from the soap made it easier to stroke himself off and Stiles took his time. If everybody knew what he was doing, he might as well really go for it. As long as he didn't call anybody's name (Derek's), the humiliation was only at a minimum.

He came harder than he'd ever come before—even that time he first discovered his prostate. He had to put a hand out to grab the wall in order to keep himself from falling over, his knees were so weak from his orgasm.

Stiles leisurely cleaned the rest of himself, washing his hair with the tiny amount of shampoo left in there from someone else's visit. He turned the water off and toweled himself off, wrapping the towel around his still wet hips and went to face the music. He hoped to God that Derek had left the room, but his prayers had gone unanswered before. Derek looked like he hadn't moved an inch, but Stiles thought his breathing was a little harsher than before. Okay, whatever, if Derek wanted to sleep in a bit longer, who was Stiles to say he couldn't? It would have just saved everyone some dignity if he'd left, but whatever.

He sifted through his suitcase and took literally the first shirt, boxers, and pants he could find. He'd layer up after breakfast, he just had to get the hell out of this room. He pocketed his cell phone from the nightstand and when he bent down slightly to pick it up, noticed Derek's skin was a bit rosier than usual. This was going to be a weird fucking day, Stiles was calling it now. Time of death: he looked down to his phone, 7:00 am. Oh, God, 7:00 AM really?!

No wonder Derek was trying to go back to sleep. Oh well, Stiles was already up, showered, and there was no way he was going fall back asleep. Breakfast, he decided, was definitely the right call. Jackson's parents had the house fully stocked so Stiles could make the pack a nice, filling breakfast before they hit the snow.

Stiles tried to do that thing where you visualize yourself doing something well all through preparing the pancakes. Golfers like swore by it, right? Imagine the perfect swing and all that shit. It worked for skiing, didn't it? That was totally a thing. He sure as hell hoped it worked or the most humiliating day of his life would continue to get even worse.

One by one the pack trailed downstairs, Boyd first from the bedroom off the kitchen, obviously thinking along the same lines as Stiles about making breakfast. Stiles surrendered to Boyd's superior skills, and stepped back. He set the table around 8:30. By 8:45 every member of the pack sans their alpha was downstairs, excited and eating.

Derek trailed down the stairs at 9:00 on the dot and didn't even bother to eat his pancakes with a plate. Stiles took the opportunity to rush upstairs and throw more layers on, being one of the few members of the pack who would actually need them.

Stiles and Derek studiously ignored each other all day and though the pack picked up on it, thankfully nobody pointed it out. On the first slope they all attempted together (after a lengthy lesson from a ski dude named Brad that Stiles _did not_ want to talk about), Stiles was all set to go, he really was. He watched Allison fly down first, looking like she'd been skiing longer than she'd been walking (possibly true), followed by Erica who went about five feet before she started doing tricks. Scott went next and Stiles held his breath, hoping his buddy would at least wobble a bit. Maybe this could be like ice skating?

No dice. Scott took off after Allison, looking behind him to make sure Isaac was on his heels. He was. Super gracefully, too. Ugh, it was times like these Stiles thought about asking for the bite. He never would, but he thought about it.

To distract himself from that line of thought, Stiles blurted out a thought he'd been suppressing since learning they'd be coming here.

"Jackson, your parents aren't one of those gross couples who name their children for where they were conceived are they?" Every remaining member of the pack looked at him then. Cora rolled her eyes hard at him. Hale family trait. She didn't bother to listen to the rest of the conversation, she just calmly waddled to the start and starting skiing like an Olympic pro.

Jackson sighed. "I'm adopted, Stilinski."

Shit, and that, ladies and gentlemen, was the entire reason he'd been suppressing the thought. Damn it. Now Jackson was going to be an emo little thirteen year old girl for the rest of the day. Maybe he'd have to take him to Hot Topic and paint his claws black. "Right. Good. Glad that's settled."

Derek obviously noticed that if he didn't go soon he'd be left alone with Stiles, so Derek tentatively set out next. Jackson, ignoring Stiles completely now, thumb wrestled with Boyd to see who would go next and they both gave up and just went together, laughing and exaggeratedly holding hands. Stiles gagged a bit in his mouth. Thank God Lydia had gone shopping and didn't have to see this. Stiles now wished he'd gone shopping so _he_ didn't have to see this. Also so he didn't have to actually ski.

He finally found himself alone, standing atop the slope without his pack. People filtered around him, some eyeing him, wondering why he hadn't gone yet, and others glazed over him, just another guy in a crowd of people.

Stiles gave it a few minutes and when he was sure none of the pack would see him, he put one ski in front of the other, waddling to the starting point. At least the pole thingies were kind of cool, might make a good weapon in case they were attacked. With that thought he leaned into the slope, promising to sacrifice a snail or something if he could just not embarrass himself any further today.

Once again it was like the universe was laughing at him. Ten feet in, he fell. He got up, twenty feet, he fell. Thirty feet. Ten feet. Five Feet. "Oh, my God!" Stiles shouted, uncaring that the twelve year old girl in the pink skiing outfit flew by him on just one ski. He hoped she choked on a dick.

By the time he got down to the bottom of the hill, Allison was reaching the bottom again.

"Stiles?" She called, clearly surprised that she'd caught up to him. "Shouldn't you be way back up the hill? What are you doing down here?"

"Look, Allison, my Beautiful Huntress, can we maybe keep this a small secret between the two of us? As humans?"

"Keep what a secret?"

"Please don't make me say it."

"You're not like about to come out to me are you? Because, I hate to break it to you, Bravo Leader, but everyone knows you're hot for Derek, okay?"

Stiles gave up on life. He dropped his head down into his hands hard, smacking his own face. It felt weirdly liberating. "I hate this pack. I hate it so much."

"Shut up, no you don't. Besides, you have about sixty seconds to tell me what this is about before Scott's in range to hear you."

"I'm a horrible skier apparently. Don't tell anyone."

Her huge smile lit up in that classic Allison Argent way, and God damn it, why couldn't he stay mad at any of the females in this pack? "Sure thing, Stiles. You're secret's safe with me."

He nodded his thanks, giving her a shy smile. He wasn't used to having his own vulnerability shown to the pack, usually he was bolstering them, being the one who supported them. But it works both ways, and he was glad to have this moment with Allison. Sometimes with the Scott thing and the Isaac addition, it was hard to bond with just her alone.

"Thanks, man. I mean it." Stiles spotted Scott on the hill, he would know that crooked jawline anywhere. "I think I'm going to go shop with Lydia. Can you tell them I like twisted my ankle or something else suitably manly? Like maybe a crocodile attacked me on my way down and it caused me to break a fingernail? I dunno, be inventive. You do you."

"Shut up, Stiles," she said with affection. "I'll cover you. Go spend some time with Lydia. I bet she's lonely with no one to hold her bags."

Allison was right. He was falling out of the frying pan right into the fire. Sacrifices must be made.

He made a silly face at Allison who stuck her tongue out at him, and then he went to return his skis. Hey, maybe they'd give him a discount since he'd only used them for like twenty minutes. Didn't hurt to ask.

Three grueling hours of shopping with Lydia later and Stiles returned to his room with three bags of his own to add to his suitcase. Lydia had a way of forcing him to buy something. It was a deadly combination of careful flattery and increasingly inventive threats about what she would do to him if she couldn't see his ass in those jeans all the time. It was weird, but it worked for her. And his ass had never looked better, truly, so he just said thank you and held her bags without complaint.

The others returned for lunch and Stiles provided them with sandwiches down to the specifications of each member. Corned beef and lettuce for Cora, his Quiet Queen, ham and swiss for Isaac and on and on. Times three for werewolves.

Derek took his with a mumbled thanks and an uneasy head nod. Then lunch was over and the pack returned to the ice, thankfully not saying anything about his ankle.

"Allison," He asked after dinner that night, "What'd you tell them? You know, about the thing." She rolled her eyes. "Did you tell them about my ankle?"

"Actually," she giggled, "I told them you had massive diarrhea."

Stiles felt the need for a dramatic pause. "You're the best. Always looking out for me, huh? At least they knew you were lying."

She laughed and went to join Isaac at the pool table. She went on to wipe the floor with him. The hot tub on the back porch couldn't fit all ten of them, so they took turns, making sure to keep all romantic pairings together. It didn't slip Stiles' notice that Derek never managed to be in the hot tub at the same time as him. This was getting a tad more than ridiculous. Did Stiles always have to be the bigger man?

Around midnight the pack started heading to bed, determined to get an early start in the morning. Stiles threw up a little bit in his mouth. So he wasn't a skier, that was cool. Lots of people weren't skiers. He bet Rhianna wasn't a skier. He bet Marilyn Manson wasn't a skier. See? Lots of people could be successful and cool and not ski.

Tomorrow Lydia would be on the slopes, so Stiles would have to find something else to do. Oh well, ce la vie.

That night Derek waited for Stiles to go to bed first, probably sensing Stiles' exhaustion. He didn't waste the opportunity. He fell into bed, once again in just his underwear, though this time he managed to wear a pair that wouldn't show the tip of his dick in the morning if _things_ happened again.

He was on the periphery of sleep, just verging into the dream, he could see the tattoo in front of him and the next thing he knew, he was licking it, just like normal.

What wasn't like normal was the response Dream Derek gave him. Instead of flipping him over and rocking his world, this Derek stiffened. That alarmed Stiles, Derek never acted like this in the dream. What was wrong?

Oh, God. What was wrong was that this wasn't a dream. Stiles woke a bit more and gasped in horror.

"Oh, My God, dude. I'm sorry! I'm so sorry."

"It's fine," Derek turned onto his back. "Just don't do it again."

"Right of course not, seriously, seriously sorry." Stiles turned around, his back to Derek to put the temptation away from him. He needed to explain a bit more. He didn't want Derek to think he couldn't control himself for no reason. "That's just… that's how they start. The dreams, I mean."

Derek didn't respond, and Stiles didn't expect him to. This was the most they'd ever talked about it, besides Derek declaring he knew who his mate was yesterday. "Don't leave your back to me, and we'll be fine."

"Go to sleep, Stiles."

"Sir, yes, sir."

After the weirdness of yesterday morning, waking up in Derek Hale's arms was the last thing he thought would happen in the morning. He woke slowly, drifting higher and higher out of the dream world to his mate's arms around him. He recognized that forearm from his very first mate dream the night of his eighteenth birthday. It was almost like a premonition, but in the dream he didn't feel Derek's heart beat and he didn't smell his morning breath. The dream couldn't capture the way his fingers felt on Stiles' happy trail.

This was the worst kind of torture. To lie in your mate's arms and know that he doesn't want you? Give him liberty or give him death. None of this in between, almost-but-not-quite crap. Stiles felt disgusted. He heaved, his stomach reacting to his heart ache in the only way it knew how. Out with the bad, but the bad couldn't just leave. It sunk into his blood along with his mate's scent. It couldn't ever leave him. If he stopped seeing the rest of the pack today, their scents would slowly fade, but Derek's? The scent of a true mate would never leave. It literally became a part of you. He'd smelled like Derek's since he was born, just waiting to gain his majority for the bond to be realized. The truly mated and claimed smelled even more strongly of each other, but even in this half existence, Stiles smelled like Derek's. If he never claimed Derek he would still smell like Derek's at fifty years old. At a hundred, even.

To outside wolves, like the Beckett pack, he just smelled like his alpha, but Stiles knew after his talk with Allison that the pack was catching on. He gave them credit, they weren't stupid. He knew Scott and Lydia wouldn't spill the beans about the true mates stuff, not that he thought the others even knew what true mates were since he was the one who educated them about wolfy stuff, but they could see and smell the weirdness surrounding their alpha and his second.

Stiles wiggled a little, trying to pry himself from Derek's strong grip. He ended up just pushing himself back onto Derek's slightly hard cock and had to bite his lip from either laughing or crying or moaning or something. He still managed to wake Derek up.

They didn't move, a bit startled at realizing they were both awake and neither of them wanting to make the first move. Just when Stiles decided to try getting up again, he felt something wet on his back and Derek chuckling.

"What the hell?"

Derek just kept laughing his darkly rich glorious laugh. "Now we're even."

"Oh, shut up." The tension from the day before was broken just like that.

"I get shower first."

"Fine you big butthead."

"Did you really just call me a butthead?"

"Fine you bag of dicks."

"Bag of dicks?"

"It's early, I'm tired." He rolled over, determined to get some more sleep. "Shut your face and just go take your shower. God, the things I put up with."

"You truly are a saint, Stiles."

Stiles hummed into his pillow. "The recognition is nice."

The next two days flew by. Stiles found things to do during the skiing hours, mostly reading. And he got lunch ready, but he had a good time. The wolves wrestled around and Allison taught Stiles a few new moves that Derek let him practice. Stiles now knew basic self-defense, but he would still never be able to take on a werewolf without aid. That was fine, really. He had his pack to protect him.

On the last day of the time in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, Stiles woke in his alpha's arms as he had since that second day. Apparently Derek was a hard core cuddler, just like his sister. He'd given up on waiting for Stiles to fall asleep before he reached an arm out to him, and now Stiles fell asleep in his arms as well as woke to them. It was quite lovely.

Stiles let Derek have first shower again, they'd been on a rotating schedule, and he lounged around in bed waiting for his turn. He was just checking his phone for messages from his dad when the door creaked open.

"Stiles?"

"Princess?"

"Can I come in?" Erica asked, "I haven't even gotten to see your room."

Stiles smiled and beckoned her over. "Yeah, sure, come cuddle me. I'm just waiting for stupid Derek to get out of the stupid shower before he takes up all my hot water. He's selfish like that."

Erica giggled and twisted her head to the bathroom. "He says if he doesn't go first, he freezes his balls off."

He had to bite off a laugh. "There are worse tragedies." He and Erica splayed themselves out on the bed, the covers pooling on the ground somewhere, no longer needed with werewolf body heat. If Erica thought lying on top of him when he was just in his underwear was weird, she sure didn't say so.

They heard the water cut off in the bathroom. Stiles took his cue to gather his things, jeans, shirt, socks. Socks were so important here.

Derek came out of the bathroom in just his towel, the water droplets running races down his pecs. Stiles held his breath. Dead puppies, coffins, skiing in front of the pack… he thought of all the unsexiest things he could think of to no avail. He was sure his arousal still leaked out around him.

"Hey, what is that?" Erica asked idly. "That thing on your shoulder? Did you get a new tattoo?"

Oh shit. And this is why they meticulously avoided having a naked Derek around the pack these days. He watched Derek to follow his lead. His mark, his beta, his choice.

"No, Erica." His voice was surprisingly patient.

Her beautifully arched eyebrows scrunched. "Then what is it? It's too dark to be a hickey and you'd have healed anyway."

Derek took a deep breath, looked quickly to Stiles and must have seen something there because he answered her honestly.

"It's a mate mark. Do you know what that is?" She shook her head.

"Stiles?" Derek prompted, reaching to the bottom of his suitcase for clean clothes.

Stiles took over the explanation, now sure that Derek wanted him to tell her what it was but leave out the details. Like who his mate was. And why he hadn't been claimed.

"It means he has a true mate. Any wolf can have a mate, someone they choose to spend their lives with."

"Like me and Boyd." She sounded a little unsure, the barest hint of a question in her voice. Stiles, now sitting on the bed, pulled her into his lap and began to stroke her hair. He sensed she needed the touch.

"Yeah, like you and Boyd. You guys are in love and you're going to be together for a very long time."

"So then what about Derek?"

"A true mate means that the _intended wolf_, in this case Derek, has a _corresponding mate_ who can either be a fellow wolf or a human. The mark appears when the corresponding mate turns eighteen and then the corresponding mate begins to have dreams about their wolf."

"What makes it so special, I mean, I don't get it. Why is a true mate more special than just a mate?"

Derek avoided his eyes, now digging out his woolen socks he threw off the bed last night.

"Because a corresponding mate is literally born just for the intended wolf." Derek paused in his search. Did he not know that? Did someone leave that out of the legend when they told him about true mates as a child? Stiles hesitated on what he was about to say, it would drive home the point to Erica, but it also might make Derek a bit uncomfortable.

He chose to risk it. "Even if, say, a family had fertility trouble for years until suddenly they try again and a miracle baby is born."

Derek wasn't even trying to pretend to look through his bag anymore. He took a seat on the awkwardly placed chair next to the dresser and stared into nothingness.

"So Derek has someone who was put on this earth to love him?"

"Not necessarily," He spoke into her ear, her blonde fuzz tickling his mouth. "A true mate is meant to complete their intended. It doesn't _cause_ love, no force on earth or in nature can _cause_ love, but it can create the perfect counterpart for a grumbly sourwolf, sure."

Erica laughed softly, she turned her head and nuzzled into his shoulder. Her nose was cold on his bare skin.

"Why hasn't he found his mate, then?"

"That's not my place to say, Princess." Stiles extracted his limbs from her. "Ask him yourself. I have to shower."

He ducked into the bathroom and turned the shower on full blast, not wanting to hear the rest of the conversation.

He didn't need or want to hear Derek tell his beta that he didn't want his weak, frail, human mate who was too young, too spastic, too ADHD, too everything.

On the drive home, awkwardness radiated out of the alpha and the second. It must have been more potent than usual because Isaac and Allison tried to make conversation for thirty miles. Isaac asked Derek something about a scent natural to Jackson Hole that was answered in a gruff, one syllable grunt. Allison asked about local hunters in Wyoming that wasn't even answered at all. And Scott, bless perfect, beautiful asymmetrical Scott, actually pulled off the impossible. He broke the tension without even trying, oblivious to the undercurrent between Stiles and Derek, but plugged in to the concern from his mates.

"You know I really enjoyed my time at Jackson's Hole," he said after Allison and Isaac had given up their attempts at conversation and abandoned him to return to their magical land of Tinkerbelle and Teletubbies.

Stiles just couldn't resist. "Dude, it's just 'Jackson Hole.' How many times do I have to say it? You make it sound like a sexy getaway you had with Jackson, man. And I don't need those visuals, okay? So stop being selfish."

Stiles caught Derek's eye in the rearview mirror and he saw the amused little smile cross his mate's face. He couldn't look for too long, he needed to keep his eyes on the road, but he saw something in Derek's gaze just then. Something good. And the tension once again bled out of the car. Now if he could just joke his way into keeping this tension gone, he'd really be cooking with gas.

-Chapter Four-

Someone in the pack (Lydia) had made the executive decision to celebrate Pack Christmas on the last weekend before school started back up. It was kind of cool to have second Christmas and one last big hurrah before they had to head back. Stiles also didn't mind the extra weeks to find perfect Christmas gifts.

He kind of felt like what he assumed a parent felt like shopping for their kids' Christmas presents. He couldn't buy one of them something really nice and then get everyone else lame gifts, they'd get jealous. And he couldn't spend too much money as it was—he had no job and his dad was just a sheriff. But he wanted to get something that each person would enjoy and would actually use.

The "Boyd's Bitches" T-shirts he'd ordered were just part one of his present plan. The T-shirts were something that they could all wear and feel united in, but it was important to Stiles that each member of the pack get their own gift individualized just for them. To know that their personalities and wants were seen and recognized and celebrated.

Coming up with ideas was harder than he'd thought it'd be. Last year, they had still been a little unstable as a pack, and he'd searched high and low for great gifts. He thought he'd managed, but he also had never had this confirmed. This year, he began much earlier, but that still didn't mean he would find the perfect gift.

Last year it was Cora he'd been stuck trying to find a present for at the last minute, this year that distinction went to her brooding brother.

What was a guy supposed to get his reluctant mate, his respected alpha, his confidant? Definitely not a gift card, that was for sure. He couldn't even imagine Derek walking into a Best Buy and trying to buy the Battlestar Gallactica box set with a $50 gift card.

Nor could he picture Derek at a restaurant (by himself, always by himself for some reason) and trying to pay for his pasta with a gift card from Stiles. It just didn't add up. Derek was a tactile, physical person. He pushed people into walls that he'd just met. Okay, maybe that was just a Stiles thing, but regardless, the dude _craved_ touch. It was personal, how he needed physical contact and Stiles' brain translated this knowledge of Derek into tangible presents—things he could look at, touch, use, not an electronic number on a card he would most likely lose or accidentally claw up.

This gift had to mean something, it had to be a message. It had to show Derek that he would be by his side no matter what decision Derek came to about their mating. He had to show he was in the pack for life, that his commitment to these people was solidified, unbreakable.

He just had to figure out how the hell he was going to do that.

He was walking around the mall with Allison and Cora a couple days before Second Christmas when it finally came to him.

Second Christmas, like all other Pack holidays, took place at Derek's apartment and included plenty of food. Boyd worked his ass off cooking up a storm—a turkey (duh), mashed potatoes, green bean casserole. Boyd's southern roots only showed through the foods he decided to prepare, and absolutely none of the pack complained, which was rare. Sometimes Stiles swore they could survive off of complaining alone.

They all ate quickly, enthusiastically giving their compliments to Boyd who accepted them with aplomb. A huge pile of presents sat under the tree that Erica had bugged Derek night and day to get—she wanted the best tree that Beacon Hills could provide and in her mind that meant cutting it down themselves.

There weren't a lot of evergreen trees in the Preserve, like barely any and those were probably the remnants of some Christmas Tree farm from many years ago that went under. As it was, Erica played to Stiles' nickname for her perfectly, the princess demanding her due and bless his heart, Derek went along with it. Stiles thought he was kind of looking for an excuse to get into the spirit of Christmas, and Erica's demands were the perfect vehicle for that—he could look like he was still distant and grumbly when his gooey insides were singing "Jingle Bells" loudly and slightly off key.

The tree was decorated by pieces of hardened clay with handprints of the humans and each of the werewolves' claw prints embedded in them, much like a kindergartener might make for their parents. Stiles, feeling devious, had gone to the art supply store and insisted they make them, the pups' hand prints. He presented them to Derek the day after the tree went up and they were still the only decorations that adorned the tree, besides the Frankenstein head that Derek had thrown up in the place of a star.

"You like that Frankenstein so much, I figured he could stick around a little longer." Derek refused to comment any further than this, and Stiles could feel his embarrassment about the whole thing, showing affection without acknowledging their connection. It was a hard line to walk.

Still, the gesture managed to warm the cockles of Stiles' heart. He did love that Frankenstein. Seeing it atop the tree made him feel like his mother was still around him. And how messed up was that? That a decapitated Frankenstein at Christmas made him think fondly on his time with his mother? She would have gotten a real kick out of that. It would have made her like Derek, Stiles thought, even if she hadn't already liked him.

Stiles often wondered what his mother would think of his werewolf pack. Would she be proud of him for keeping them all together? Or would she want him to have nothing to do with the supernatural world? In his heart of hearts, Stiles liked to think that she would find supernatural stuff just as cool as he did. She would probably be mad that she had to leave before they could have explored it together.

With his mother on his mind, Stiles looked around at the pack sorting through the presents, each grabbing their own and throwing others' at their owners. Stiles made rules early on during their first Christmas—each present had to be wrapped (Jackson!), and it had to be neatly labeled with who it was for and who it was from.

Moreover, on opening said presents, each pup had to clearly state who it was from before they could open it. This way, Stiles had explained when they all complained about having to go one at a time, they could all see what each other had gotten. Afterwards it seemed that they appreciated the idea and so far he'd heard no complaints about repeating it for this year.

Derek sat calmly on his usual spot on the couch, surrounded by presents of every color. He looked blank faced as usual, but Stiles could sense his happiness. He was trying too hard, Stiles thought. He was so concerned about looking the part of the alpha around the pups that he lost his own joy sometimes. Stiles wasn't about to let that happen.

"Move over, Sour wolf. Papa's got a big load over here." Stiles did indeed have his hands full of his own presents. He sat in the newly opened space next to Derek, his usual spot.

"That sounds like an innuendo."

Stiles snorted. "That's because it totally was, dude. Do you know me at all?"

"Don't call me dude."

"That was weak sauce. You can do better than that." Stiles started separating his presents by size. "Better yet, you don't have to pretend you aren't having a blast."

"Shut up, Stiles."

When Derek started telling Stiles to shut up, it usually meant the argument was won. Stiles grinned, elbowing Derek in the ribs.

"C'mon, Derek. We're having a good time here. You wanna go first? Let the alpha get to open his presents before anyone else?"

Derek adjusted the presents lying in his lap, throwing a few on the floor by his feet, careful not to get them mixed up with Scott's. "You just want to be able to go second. I'm not stupid, you know."

"Beauty, brawn, _and_ brains! He has it all, ladies and gentlemen." Derek did that thing where he looks at the ceiling, trying to hide his amusement to no avail.

He directed his next comment to the pack at large. "How close are we, guys?"

Cora answered from the tree, "That's all of them, I think. If we're missing any, we'll find them later. Can we start, Derek?" The excitement on her face made her look about twelve and it hit Stiles again that the last time she had a real Christmas with family around (besides last year with the pack) she probably _was_ twelve or even younger.

Derek nodded and everyone took their places. Stiles' heart was still breaking for Cora. "Why don't we go youngest to oldest?" He casually suggested, knowing that Cora was dying to open her presents. He was too, he'd gotten her a kick ass present. Nun chucks. Derek wasn't going to be thrilled, but Stiles knew that Cora would love them.

She did. Stiles found it a testament to how awesome he was that she dug through her pile of presents until she got to his and opened it first. The sparkle in her eyes burned with her excitement.

"Oh, my God! Stiles!"

"Yeah, yeah. Aren't they awesome?"

"Yeah, yeah they're freaking awesome alright. Practice later?"

"No," Derek said, "lessons from an instructor first. Open mine next."

Cora opened Derek's next and found a certificate to a local martial arts studio to learn how to use them. Stiles had no idea that Derek even knew he'd gotten his little sister weapons, but he was obviously okay with it. Stiles wasn't sure how he felt about matching gifts. It felt kind of couple-y. And Derek had made it clear that they weren't a couple.

Cora opened the rest of her presents and then it was Boyd's turn. Stiles went fifth. Only Derek, Isaac, Allison, and Jackson were older than him.

He had many little gifts around him, a few the size of his feet. One of the packages was pretty big, it was wrapped in a box and then wrapped in paper that he didn't recognize. He made an impulse decision to open it last.

The pack showered him this year. Boyd got him a chef hat that said "Boyd's Sous-chef" and Stiles was only mad at Erica for spilling the beans for a second before he laughed at how awesome it was.

"Dude, you know I'll be wearing this every time I even use the microwave, right?"

He moved on to his gift from Lydia, a predictable blend of ancient books and straight off the runway skinny jeans. Lydia sure had a thing for him in skinny jeans. Jackson gave him a book on college lacrosse that he probably wouldn't use but appreciated nonetheless. Scott got him the latest Bioshock that he'd been dying to play (and finish this time, damn it!). Cora and Allison got him a switchblade and sprayable wolfsbane respectively. He received a sports bra from Erica that he found strange until she told him that was for her to wear with a smirk and then pulled the real gift out from under it. Handcuffs. He smiled bizarrely, not really sure where she was going with that gift, but that was Erica for you.

He finally got the final present and saw it was from Isaac. He was decidedly _not_ wondering why Derek hadn't gotten him a present. He wasn't. Really. Okay, so like 99% of his attention was now focused on Derek, but it wasn't like it was 100%.

Stiles forced himself to smile and be grateful. He couldn't let his frustration and disappointment with Derek bleed out into his most needy puppy. Isaac got him a gift basket of random items: a blanket, personalized cups with his name on them, a toothbrush, monogrammed towels, it was kind of weird really, and he was mega confused.

"Um, thanks, Isaac, this is um awesome."

Isaac nodded like he expected Stiles to be confused. "It's for here."

"What?"

"Stuff that you can leave here at Derek's apartment. You're here more than anyone else, and I guess I kind of figured you would feel more comfortable with some of your own stuff."

Stiles kept his emotions to himself. There was no need to freak out about how awkward this would make things with Derek. Ugh, he hated this up and down going on between them. One second they were fine and best bros and getting along like whoa, and then the next second they were avoiding each other like lepers, scared to touch each other for fear of it being taken the wrong way. Then bam! They were sleeping in each other's arms? Seriously, what the fuck is his life.

"Thank you, Isaac. That was really sweet and thoughtful." He purposefully didn't look at Derek, not going to ask if his present had gotten lost or anything, he just let it go. If only he could just let everything go. "So who's next? Isaac, right?"

They continued to open presents. Derek opened his last as the oldest by five years, and he almost teared up when he got to Stiles'.

He unwrapped the silver paper slowly. Derek was one of those annoying people who unstuck the tape instead of ripping the paper like a normal person. It made Stiles itch in his seat, he had to sit on his fingers to keep from jumping across the cushion that separated them to rip the paper for him, like a mother helping her unaware toddler on his second birthday.

Wow, Stiles needed to stop making himself the mother in all the metaphors in his head. It was tolerable in relation to his pups, but definitely crossed a line in regards to Derek.

The suspense was killing him. Would Derek like his gift or would he think Stiles had crossed a line? Stiles fervently hoped for the former.

Finally after an ice age, Derek got the box beneath the paper opened and a small trinket fell into his open palm. Stiles was struck again by the shiny pendant, just as he had been in the mall the other day. It was so reflective that you could see your face in it, a bit warped by the curved edges. On one face of the pendant a trisokeole was etched into the surface, perfectly matching Derek's tattoo. On the back, Stiles had Derek's initials carved as well as the year.

Derek smiled faintly, hesitantly. "Open it," Stiles called from across the couch, the rest of the pack quieter than he'd ever heard them, all waiting with bated breath. Allison and Cora already knew about the gift and Stiles had even gotten Cora's permission for the inside.

The hidden latch sprung free and the locket opened. Inside, Stiles had placed a picture of the Hale family from a story in the newspaper about two months before the fire. On the opposite side, he'd placed a picture of their current pack from Thanksgiving.

He knew it was a bit weird giving another man a piece of jewelry, especially a locket of all things. But from the outside, you couldn't tell it was a locket in the first place. Stiles figured Derek could keep his secrets more hidden that way. Furthermore, the pendant just screamed Derek's name. It was very masculine in its shape, and the long chain attached to it was long enough to be hidden under his clothes. If he did have to go full alpha, the chain was long enough not to choke him, yet short enough to stay attached to his neck and not get in his way.

To put it frankly, it was a total man's necklace. He'd been very nervous about it, but Allison and Cora's opinions tipped him over the edge to say that yes, it was something that Derek would appreciate and on top of that, actually wear and use. Allison tried to hint that Derek would love it simply because it came from Stiles, but he wouldn't let her get past the first part of that sentence.

Stiles looked carefully to his alpha's face for his reaction. Derek seemed…overwhelmed. His face was blank, his emotions carefully hidden as usual, but that spark that connected them burned brightly and warmly, flaring up in the mutual affection felt at this moment. That was when Stiles thought he saw the beginning of a tear in Derek's eye, and that freaked him out more than that time he played bait for the omega from Atlanta.

Derek threw the chain over his head and quickly tucked the pendant under his shirt. In a rare show of affection, he put his hand over Stiles' that was resting on the couch between them and squeezed. "Thank you, Stiles."

"Yeah, uh, anytime." Stiles cleared his throat. Was that creaky sound really his voice? There were way too many emotions flying around in Derek's tiny two bedroom apartment.

"That was my last one, guys." Derek announced to the pack in an effort to stave off his own emotional reaction. "Are we ready for Stiles' final gift?"

"What? I get another gift? Where is it?!" Stiles clapped his hands together like the toddler he had just accused Derek of being. "Gimmie gimmie gimmie!"

The whole pack laughed at his antics, but it was Lydia who looked to Derek. At his nod, she walked into Cora's room and grabbed a rather large gift. Whatever it was, it was wrapped in one of those Christmas bags, probably too awkward or bulky to be wrapped.

Lydia kissed his cheek as she put it in his lap, and as per his own rules, Stiles looked to the tag to read out who it was from.

Officially, he read, it was from the entire pack. "This is from all of you?" He asked the room at large.

Jackson perked up from Lydia returning to their section of the carpet. "Well, it's mostly from Derek, but yeah, we all helped."

Derek's face tinted the tiniest bit of pink at Jackson's comment, but he didn't correct him. So that's where his missing present went. Turns out he didn't get forgotten after all. Stiles' mood lifted, skyrocketed truth be told.

"Really?" Stiles began to tear the taped edged of the bags apart, but it was on there pretty tight.

Scott patted him on the leg, apparently excited. "We had to learn some things to help, but we all contributed to it. And I gotta say, Stiles, it turned out freaking awesome, okay? Like so cool. You're gonna love it."

"Okay, well, I'd love to love it but I think I need some werewolf help to get this stupid thing open."

"Here," Derek mumbled, hand held out to receive the bag from Stiles. "I'll get it."

Stiles passed it over and Derek slid a claw in between the pieces of paper and broke the tape.

"Oh now you want to break something. You could have done that like fifteen minutes ago and saved us all the boredom of watching you open presents at snail's pace."

He definitely heard a few sniggers in agreement at that one. Derek just smirked at him and handed the present back, ready for Stiles to pull whatever it was out.

Stiles looked down into the bag and his breath caught. It was a quilt. A patchwork quilt, by the look of it. He pulled it out and unfolded it, raising his arms up as high as he could to get a better look.

"Oh my God." He said, unable to take his eyes off the pack's masterpiece. "Oh, my freaking God. This is… this is…"

It was hands down the best fucking gift Stiles Stilinski has ever received. It had nine panels, three rows of three and each section had something that depicted a member of the pack, something made by them to represent them and their unique relationship to Stiles.

"You guys made this?"

"Derek noticed how you were always using a quilt as like the metaphor for the pack? So he said we should make one. We each made our own square for you. Took us forever, too. Especially because Jackson hogged it for like an entire month."

"Shut up, McCall."

"To be fair," Scott continued, cognizant of Stiles' awe but ignoring it for the sake of bro-hood, "Jackson's square is the coolest, so at least he didn't waste the time."

Jackson seemed to forgive him after that, but Stiles couldn't be bothered to care. He was still staring at the quilt, taking in each members' square. At the top left was Cora's. She had a red background with a crown stitched into it, her name written in cursive on the crown.

"The crown is for my Quiet Queen?" He asked her.

She nodded and Lydia spoke up. "All us girls have your nicknames for us on there. Look at mine," she pointed to the far right, middle row, where just as she'd said, a figure that looked much like Botticelli's Venus took up most of the pale yellow panel.

"And mine has a tiara on it," Erica spoke from Boyd's lap. Her tile was right below Lydia's and it was pink, so so pink and so so Erica. It was glorious.

Scott's tiles between Erica's and Allison's (complete with a bow and arrow on a forest green background) was a dark navy blue and had a full moon on it. At least, that's what Stiles assumed it was. Scott was obviously not gifted at embroidery or whatever the fuck you called stitching these days. Boyd's predictably had a chef's hat and a stack of pancakes. Isaac's looked like he'd tried to make it look like anime, complete with a picture of him and Stiles holding hands with huge eyes and lots of hearts. Totes adorbs, of course. Scott was right on the money when he said Jackson's was the coolest. It totally was—the background was a fabric that had metallic-y scales worked into a pattern and on top of it, Jackson had added tasteful amounts of icons that made up, well, _Jackson_. He had lacrosse sticks, a lifeguard's whistle, a reptilian eye, and a thumb tack that made sense to Stiles, but wouldn't make sense to anyone else unless Jackson had ignored his threats and told someone about that story that they'd both sworn on the full moon that they were never going to tell anyone else. He and Jackson survived on a mutual secret keeping that bordered on unhealthy.

And then in the middle was Derek's. His looked like he'd messed it up a few times and had to re-start. The black background appeared to have too many holes for how much threading had come out in the final product. Two red dots took up most of the space, and as Stiles looked closer, he noticed it was a face. Derek had made his entire square into a replica of his alpha form, stitched in subtly, were white lines that outlined the face and hair he had as a full wolf. The red eyes had remarkable detail, and Stiles wondered how much time and effort Derek had put into it to make it so accurate. He must have watched boatloads of Youtube videos to learn how to do that.

Bless his soul, that man was more confusing than anything or anyone Stiles had ever met. He rebuked Stiles' mate status, he treated him like a leper one day and his only friend another, he only doled out affection very rarely, but then he did shit like this. You don't make someone a mother fucking love quilt if you can't stand them.

You don't make a quilt for someone you respect, you have to put love and dedication and commitment into it. You have to chase down contributors and make sure it gets done on time. You have to buy thread and needles and fabric and shit. You have to make sure the contributors learn how to fucking sew. That's not a fucking gift card, alright?

Stiles took a deep breath, trying to compose himself. "Guys, I—I have no fucking idea what to say, okay? He looked specifically at Derek as he spoke the next line. He didn't want to embarrass him when Derek had gone so far out of his way to make sure it wasn't just from him. "This is _seriously_ the best present I've ever gotten."

Stiles knew he was a bit more in touch with his feelings than other eighteen year old boys his age. Werewolf business wasn't even the biggest contributor to this, either. When a ten year old boy loses his mom and has to spend the next year cleaning the spilled whisky out of the carpet from where his dad passed out on the couch in the living room because he just couldn't bring himself to sleep in the same bed where he was so happy with his wife—well, it forced a maturity out of Stiles.

He didn't show it often, mostly in his grades and in his relationships. Most normal relationships between teenage boys do not have the depth and level of communication that Stiles had cultivated with Scott over the years. Yes, men have feelings too, Stiles knew that better than anyone. But men oftentimes have trouble expressing those emotions, whether because of society's corruption of the idea of communicating emotions as being _feminine_, or because they just lack the knowledge of _how_ to successfully intimate their feelings, the point was: Stiles was an outlier as far as emotional depth in a young man.

He dealt with his father, and yeah that aged him in the first place. But continuing to be a caregiver to Erica, to Isaac especially, to be the one who checked over Cora's homework? Well, that required a level of emotional acuity that Stiles had to force.

He didn't just fall into place as the pack's emotional center. He identified a need in his pups and there was no one else to fill it. So he did it himself. Isaac's father wasn't going to come back from the dead, suddenly become a nice person, and then take Isaac to therapy without making him feel judged. Boyd wasn't going to be able to talk to his parents about werewolf stuff—especially with the growing separation he felt from them after the death of his sister. Jackson was always going to be a douche, but even he needed a touchstone sometimes, someone to keep him grounded and his head screwed on tight.

Stiles became all these things because _no one else would_.

And here, in this quilt, the pack showed that they were listening to him. They heard him, and they appreciated him. All his lovely ladies putting his special names for them, names he calls them so easily that he doesn't even think about what name he's using until the man on the other end of the aisle from him in the grocery store tries to share a "I hear you" nod with him when he's picking up tampons for his "princess."

They were listening to him when he told them tidbits about himself. Cora's square has a reeces cup sewn into it. Allison's arrow pointed to a crude drawing of his jeep, down to the smallest detail (though it still turned out somewhat wonky. Stiles loved it anyway and all the more for it). Scott, wonderful, breathtaking Scott, had a crude grave in the bottom left corner that was marked "Uncle Creeper" with dead flowers all around it, and on the other side in the right corner, a beautiful grave was surrounded by grape hyacinths.

Scott had even remembered his mother's favorite flower.

Derek, who preferred to keep it secret that it was Stiles who spent so many hours helping him figure out the alpha form, used that as his main representation. Derek, whose idea this whole thing was, who had made this whole entire thing possible. Derek who wanted Stiles around, even if he didn't _want_ him. Stiles was conflicted and whole all at once.

Because this quilt was more than a gift, it was validation. It was unconditional acceptance and a fierce love that bespoke many confidences, alliances, partnerships, friendly rivalries, friends, everything under the sun. This was as clear a gesture as they could make. They were a pack, they were a family, and they were Stiles'. And he wouldn't have it any other way.

After riding the high of Second Christmas, the pack returned to normal relatively quickly. Suspiciously quickly, actually.

By the Thursday after they'd gone back to school the pack was making plans to see the newest Marvel movie in theaters together. They didn't often go to the movies, mostly because nobody could ever agree on one movie and at least when they just rented from Red Box (thankfully Derek had taken Stiles up on those coupons), they were out one dollar split between the ten of them. Paying $10 a person for a movie they didn't want to see? Unnecessary.

Somehow the stars aligned for that Friday, though, and Stiles allowed himself to start getting excited for the movie. A small part of him was patting himself on the back, congratulating the great and powerful Stiles on bringing most of the pack over to the Marvel side of things, or hell, to comic books at all (Lydia, sigh). Finally they were starting to see the light.

After school, he drove Scott and Isaac home because Lydia wanted to go with Allison so they could talk about girl stuff. Stiles tried really hard not to feel excluded, he reminded them all the time that he wasn't actually a girl. That didn't mean, however, that he didn't enjoy the gossip—Stiles just loved information and knowledge of all types and he genuinely liked learning things about people he knew.

Also he liked first dibs on blackmail, but whatever, okay? And Scott never cared to know these things, and Isaac didn't care to even know the _person_ he was talking about, let alone what had happened to them. Basically they were beyond useless on the gossip front. Like, so dead to him. But whatever, guy time was awesome too. He played video games, MMPORGs, whatever. He'd had way less time to devote to them since becoming a full-time werewolf helper/adviser/researcher/babysitter but that was okay. He preferred real people over fake avatars anyway.

It seriously was hard to go from battling pixies in the real world to seeing them represented in some of these games he was playing, though. For sure, that was weird. Like, did the game creators even do their fucking homework when they were coming up with this shit? Pixies and fairies are super different, and they'd be the first (and last) to tell you.

Stiles texted Boyd as he pulled into his own drive way to see if Boyd wanted in on dinner before they went to the movie, but Boyd replied back that his mom was making dinner and expected him to be there since they were trying to grow close as a family again.

Stiles felt a pang of disappointment warring with happiness for his beta. Boyd deserved to have a real family, his blood, and Stiles' desire to see a movie wasn't even remotely on the table as far as a credible argument. Maybe if those pixies attacked again…

Damn Stiles had to stop thinking about pixies so much.

Boyd was out, but that was okay. The rest of the pack was still going. Stiles sang under his breath on his drive over, a little lonely and amused by his loneliness. He wasn't used to being in his car alone these days unless he was on his way to pick someone up.

Precisely twenty minutes before the movie was set to start, Stiles pulled into a spot near the front of the theater. He'd lucked out that somebody was pulling out of a front row spot just as he came barreling down the aisle. He got to slide right in.

At the ticket counter he spotted Derek and went to stand by him. No one else was there, which was unusual. Allison was a bit of a time nazi and always had to be punctual. Consequently, Scott and Isaac (decidedly _not_ time nazis) should have been there already too. Strange.

"Hey, man. Where is everyone?" Stiles fumbled in his back pocket for his wallet.

Derek crossed his arms and glared at the couple in front of them, holding hands and nuzzling their noses together. Stiles threw up in his mouth a little bit. Not even on purpose.

"Isaac said to say that he and Scott and Allison can't come because, and I quote '_something came up and we need to talk about it as a couple, I mean, as…well, you know' _and then he abruptly hung up and wouldn't answer when I called him back."

God, Stiles loved Derek's pup impression. It didn't matter who was talking, the voice always sounded the same. Stiles was convinced he now just did that voice so that you would know he wasn't expressing his own thought, as if by using such an utterly ridiculous voice to say the words the person being utterly ridiculous used, that his listener would also think the situation was utterly ridiculous.

It rarely worked on Stiles, but he appreciated the voice nonetheless.

Stiles bit back his amusement before reporting his own news. "I heard from Boyd that he's got to eat with his parents tonight. Something about bonding or whatever. Can't begrudge him that."

Derek nodded in agreement. "Yeah, good for him. It's been wearing on him."

"I know." They bobbed their heads, feet shuffling forward as the cutesy couple ahead of them separated to pay for their tickets. Stiles found an imaginary itch on his arm and scratched the hell out of it.

"Hear from anyone else?" Stiles asked, now looking around a bit worried. It wasn't like Lydia to be this late. Even if she liked to make a big entrance (which, duh, she totally did), she would never miss the previews, those were her favorite part of the whole movie experience. Back when he was obsessed with her, Stiles had figured their compatibility on this fact alone. It really was all he needed to know.

Derek looked down to check his phone and Stiles saw over his shoulder that they were down to ten minutes before the start of their movie. "Cora says she isn't coming."

"Does she say why?" Stiles was starting to have an awful feeling about this.

"She just said she has a lot of homework to do tonight, something about a last minute project that Harris assigned for her class."

Stiles had to concede that her story could certainly be plausible. Harris was known to do far worse. In his pocket, the text tone for Jackson dinged. Stiles gave Jackson a kitten's meow and laughed every time it went off.

"Jackson says he and Lydia are… wow, okay, Jackson says he and Lydia are _doing it_ and not to disturb them. Oh my God, really? Who are these people we surround ourselves with?"

"It gets worse," Derek grumbled, looking at his own phone. "Erica can't come either."

"Erica's not coming either? Hmm, okay, pack you guys aren't being subtle at all anymore. What reason did _she_ give?"

Instead of reading it out loud, Derek handed his phone over and a second later, Stiles understood why. Erica's text just said: _Not coming. On my period. Have fun, kisses!_

Stiles dropped the phone. "Oh, my God." He bent over quickly to retrieve it, sensing Derek's glare. But really, Derek, it was nigh impossible to break a Nokia phone by dropping it. Everyone knew that. Everyone who had the internet knew that. Then again, maybe Derek didn't know that.

"God, Stiles, it's not like it's contagious. Chill out."

"Oh, shut up. So everyone ditched us, basically."

They both knew what had happened. Or, at least Stiles assumed they both knew. By Derek's increasingly tight back and raised shoulders, he inferred that they were on the same page. The pack had finally gotten sick of them tip toeing around each other and taken things into their own hands. They were like vigilantes. Ugh, Stiles hated real life vigilantes. They were the scum of the earth according to his dad. (Though superheroes were obviously the coolest and did not apply in this situation.)

The question remained, though, if they were going to stay and watch the movie or go home. Just as this thought hit Stiles, they were at the front of the line.

A short, brown haired girl in a polyester uniform looked out at them from under the thickest pair of glasses Stiles had ever seen. "What movie and how many tickets?" Employee of the year for customer service, she was not.

Derek didn't look at him, he pulled out his debit card (pin number 112387—Laura's birthday) and bought two tickets and two ginormous buckets of popcorn.

By the expectant looks from the pack at their meeting the next day they were extremely proud of themselves. Well, not in Stiles' book. Meddling little wolfsies did not get to look at him with those condescending smirks, like they _knew better than him_. He hated that.

The joke was on them, though. Stiles had a good time with Derek, but only as bros. They watched the movie, talked through the entire thing and afterwards they got milkshakes to discuss pack business which was now the subject of this pack meeting.

Lydia made it to Derek's before Stiles and opened the door when he walked up, a knowing smile on her face. "Well?" She asked, like they were still besties after this and like she had a right to hear about his non-date date.

"Pack meeting, Lydia," Stiles replied. "Sorry you couldn't make it to Thor 2 because you were busy getting down and dirty with _Jackson_. It was freaking awesome, so… your loss."

"And did you and our dear alpha have an amazing time?" She refused to let him in the door, just keeping him hanging around the front door like some girl scout from hell.

"I have no idea what you're talking about. Now let me in."

She looked murderous. And hell to the no. She did not get to be upset with him after he told her straight to her face not to meddle in this.

"Let him in, Lydia," came Derek's voice from inside. Great, now there was confirmation that Derek had heard everything that had been said. Perfect.

She reluctantly opened the door wider, allowing him to step through. Stiles was not above making an aborted head-butting motion. In your face, Lydia.

Stiles was one of the last to arrive. He made a sandwich with supplies he had bought earlier in the week and put the sandwich on one of his new plates courtesy of Isaac. A few minutes later the last of the brood arrived and they got down to business.

"So what's this about?" Scott asked from the floor, his hand tangled with Allison's. "I mean, Peter hasn't come back yet has he? What was so important we couldn't just wait until Sunday Funday to talk about it?"

Stiles looked to Derek and took it upon himself to transition them into this one. "Good question, Scott. Very astute."

Also, it was important to make sure Scott was still verbally rewarded every time he made excellent observations. He was a smart dude, really, but he could be so oblivious to what was going on around him if it didn't have directly to do with Isaac or Allison. Stiles liked to make sure Scott knew that Stiles appreciated his intelligence, that he saw it and gave credit where it was due.

Derek took over, "The Beckett pack from Jackson Hole has been," he looked to Stiles, just daring him to say something, "emailing me about a few things."

Erica's jaw dropped. "You have an email address?"

"Right?!" Stiles exclaimed, glad to have someone else see it his way, his elation taking over for the bitterness he'd been feeling towards his pack. "That's what I said!"

Derek bit his lip and stared at the wall so hard he looked like lasers were going to start coming out of those red eyes. Stiles had a weird flash of Derek as the Terminator and had to dig his nails into his palm to keep himself from laughing.

"Anyway," Derek started, trying to calm the tittering from the pack back into something manageable. "Alpha Beckett has heard rumors that concern us."

"What kind of rumors?" Allison asked, every inch the hunter. "And how do they concern us?"

"Hush now, he's getting to that." Stiles nodded to Derek like he'd just done him a huge favor. He knew that would irritate his alpha. Sometimes he took great pleasure in annoying other people. It was like power tripping, but with just the power to annoy people. Ah, the gift. Some people had it, others did not.

Derek was loosely holding onto his patience. "The pack in Sacramento has been acting strange, according to their ally packs. There are rumors of strange and secretive behavior from them and Alpha Beckett thought we should be aware, since we aren't too far from them."

"Which was nice of her and all after she was so rude to us." Stiles couldn't help but point out. He crossed his arms in front of him. He didn't care how many points she earned back after the fact—three strikes was three strikes in his book and she was still out.

"Stiles." Derek grit out, and really that was all he needed to say.

"Yeah, sorry, keep going big guy."

"Gee," Derek said sarcastically, "thanks for your permission."

"Not a problem."

Derek let it go after that, obviously knowing he was never going to win a snark-off with Stiles Snarky-Snark Stilinski. He could be an honorable mention, but never the winner. That was okay, because Stiles was never going to win in an arm wrestling competition, so really it all evened out in the end, didn't it?

"Linda thinks something is fishy about the whole situation. She hasn't heard directly from their alpha, just from the second and apparently that's unusual for them. Basically, keep a sharp eye and nose out."

"Wait, that's it?" Scott asked. "Why did we need this entire meeting just for you to say that?"

"That wasn't the reason for the entire meeting, Scott." Derek said, doing that thing where he looked like he was inwardly cursing himself for somehow landing in a pack of teenagers. He got that look a lot in the beginning, but it had plateaued since then. Now it was strange to see on his face, almost like what he would look like if he were constipated. "We're also going to go over strategies and your development individually and as a pack."

The pack grumbled as one. Everyone hated this monthly meeting of basically public humiliation and consequently, they'd become adept at finding reasons to skip those meetings. Derek and Stiles early on in the forming of the pack, pretty much as soon as they'd established the pack and had their argument about Stiles not being the alpha but the second, had decided this progress report was necessary. In order to grow, the pack would need accurate feedback and so once a month they'd establish one pack meeting to go over the strength and weaknesses of each member of the pack, regardless of what race they were: wolf, human, black, white, Hispanic, whatever, if you were in the pack you had your time in the limelight. The pack _hated _it. When one meeting came and went with most of the pack coming up with excuses to not be there, Derek realized something was going on. Derek for once had caught onto this without having to be told by Stiles and had come up with what in Stiles' mind was an appropriate response to the problem: surprise meetings.

Stiles had a feeling this had not just a little to do with the pack's interference in their not-a-relationship. He couldn't work up even an inch of empathy for them. They deserved every second of this torture, and Stiles would be delighted to add his own two cents in and keep it going even longer.

"We'll start with you, Lydia," Stiles smirked. "How's that right cross coming along?"

Stiles thought the punishment the pack received after their interference in his and Derek's personal business would have been enough to discourage them from trying something like that again. Stiles, however, underestimated Lydia Martin and that was a mistake he certainly would never make again.

The next time it happened, Stiles found himself at Maybelle's waiting for Allison and Erica to meet him. When Derek walked in and headed straight towards him with a resigned look on his face, Stiles immediately knew what was up.

"Hmm, they do it again?"

"Yeah," Derek replied, slipping easily into the booth seat across from Stiles. It was the same table they'd sat at before for milkshakes and Stiles somehow in the week between awkward not-dates had started thinking of it as _their_ table. "Who was it for you?"

"Allison and Erica. We were supposed to have a catch up gossip session since I've been mad at them, but obviously they've, um, dropped the ball on that."

"I was supposed to meet Jackson. He didn't even bother to cancel. This has Lydia written all over it."

"Damn it." Stiles slammed his fist on the table in a rare fit of rage. "She promised me right here in this diner she wouldn't interfere. God, I should have known better, really I should have. Maybelle's is sacred, man, you can't just mess with that shit."

"Interfere with what—oh."

"Yeah, oh." Stiles gripped the menu he'd memorized ten years ago tightly in his hand.

"So this is awkward."

"Yeah," Stiles grimaced. "Want to go to my house and play video games? You know how to play Portal don't you?"

"Let's go." Derek was up and out the door before Stiles realized he didn't get a definitive yes or no if he knew how to play video games. Either way, Stiles decided, watching Derek play a game would be hilarious.

A few days after that when Stiles was leaving his house super early to avoid everyone in the pack while he was still mad at them (except for maybe Isaac; it was hard to stay mad at Isaac), he stopped by the Starbucks where he'd met Peter before to order his early morning treat before he went to school.

Instead of Ernie, his usual barista who was about ten years too old to really sell the whole bohemian barista thing, there was a new guy behind the counter ready to take his order. Stiles stopped short. It wasn't that there was anything wrong with the guy. In fact, as far as Stiles could see, there were a lot of things going _right_ for this guy.

"Where's Ernie?"

The guy smiled at him, a real smile and not one of those I-have-to-smile-at-all-the-customers smiles that so many people wore these days in the service industry. It looked good on his face, like he was used to smiling a lot.

"You must be Stiles."

"What, you know my name?" Stiles wasn't freaked out yet, but he did find it weird and noteworthy that this stranger knew his name. People knowing his name before he knew theirs oftentimes led to disaster and mayhem in the supernatural world.

The guy chuckled easily. "I'm covering for Ernie today. His daughter has a doctor's appointment and his wife couldn't make it. He left a cup with your name on it and instructions on how to make your drink properly. He says you're a _VIP_ here."

Stiles heard the door chime behind him, but it didn't even register. His brain was whirling. "Wait, wait wait, Ernie's _married_? He has a kid? How did I not know this?"

"Well," Nameless guy responded, leaning slightly forward onto the counter, "maybe he just didn't want someone as cute as you to know he wasn't available."

"Ew, Ernie? Doubt it, dude." Stiles said before even thinking about what this guy was saying to him. Or, for that matter, _how_ he was saying it. "Wait, what? I'm sorry I'm confused—"

Nameless guy laughed again, but not meanly. "Are you always this confused when someone flirts with you?"

"As a matter of fact," Stiles answered honestly, "yeah."

From behind him, Stiles could hear a very distinctive yet subtle growling. Oh no. No, seriously, anything but this. Any_one_ but this. This was going to be a very long day, Stiles was calling this shit right now.

As if by acknowledging the growl belonged to his alpha, the connection that tethered them together lit up and Stiles suddenly knew beyond the shadow of a doubt that Derek Hale was standing behind him. And that he was not happy.

Well fuck Derek Hale. Stiles was a single man, and Derek had done nothing about that fact and thus had no say in the matter. And if Stiles flirted back more than he would if he did not have an audience, well, that was between Stiles and his very morally grey conscience.

"But I've been told," Stiles put his elbows on the counter in front of him, leaning into Nameless guys' personal space, "that the confused look is good for me. What do you think," he scrutinized his name tag, "Wes?"

"I concur whole hard-edly" Wes enunciated quite clearly his real meaning and it was not lost on Stiles. Unfortunately it was also not lost on Derek.

Stiles felt a handful of claws grab the collar of the back of his shirt and yank. He stumbled back into a hard chest.

"He'll have his usual and I'll have a black coffee. _Thanks_." Derek bit out between fangs.

Wes took one look at the super scary dude clearly marking Stiles as his property and ducked his head to get their drinks ready, refusing to look at him anymore. Stiles ripped himself out of his alpha's grip. "What the hell was that, dude? Are you shitting me?"

"He was flirting with you."

"Yeah and? It happens more often than you'd think, okay? I'm not some plague begotten leper, alright? Besides, it's not like I was about to drop down to my knees and suck his cock, _God_."

"Outside, now." Derek ordered in his own version of the serious business voice. Stiles felt too large a portion of himself eager to please his alpha and didn't bother to fight the order. He knew how to pick his battles and fighting about it in front of civilians would just not do. He threw the swinging door open dramatically and slunk to the ground outside the door, trying not to freeze his balls off.

Derek came out a minute later, tops. The barista must have rushed their order to just get them out of there. Stiles was torn between being thankful and finding him a cowardly idiot. If he had been at all interested in the barista, this craven behavior would have turned him off completely to the guy. As it was, he was already disappearing from Stiles' mind. He had bigger fish to fry.

Derek thrust a coffee into Stiles' hands and then pulled him around back to the alley between the Starbucks and the Yoga studio next door.

Stiles did not like this. "I swear to God if you don't stop manhandling me, Derek."

"You'll what? Finish your threat?"

"I'll finish something, alright."

"What the hell was that, Stiles?" Derek demanded to know, pointing back at the Starbucks like Stiles didn't know exactly what he was talking about.

"That was casual flirting, Derek. I don't think you ever engage in it, so maybe you should have taken notes. Or like, look it up on Youtube or something. You know what? I'm sure there's an app for that."

"You know what I mean."

Stiles saw red. A wave of rage rocked the usually sandy shores of Stiles and transformed into an ugly maelstrom of negative energy. Hurricane Stiles was about to reach Cape Hale. "No, I don't fucking know what you mean, Derek. What exactly did I do wrong? Tell me. Please, I'd love to know what I've done that goes against _any_ of our rules. Did I endanger the pack? No. Did I tell anyone about the supernatural world? Hell to the no. Did I—"

"So while the Sacramento pack gets closer and closer, mysterious deaths happening in all the towns between there and here, you're what—getting off?"

"First of all, fuck you because nothing about that situation was me getting off. I'm not getting off at all."

"So you weren't throwing yourself at some random guy, Stiles? Because that's exactly what I saw."

Stiles hissed out sharply, his eyes boring into Derek' and his resolve steely. "You saw what you wanted to see."

Derek didn't back down either. He took a micro step, trying to intimidate Stiles into submission. "He smelled like he was two seconds away from throwing you up against the wall and going to town."

"And how did I smell, o alpha my alpha?" Stiles wrenched out, sarcastically but still with a seriousness that compelled Derek to think for a second beyond his meager understanding of the situation.

This question made Derek draw a blank. "That's right, you idiot. I didn't smell like lust at all, did I? And you've been around me enough to know what that smells like."

"But you were—you were blatantly— you didn't have to—" Derek sputtered, inarticulate in his confusion. Stiles had an idea of what was going on. This was just a classic case of 'it's my toy and even if I'm not playing with it, you can't have it either' and that really didn't sit well with the second. He was not some Barbie doll to be dressed up every once in a while and put in a cabinet whenever Derek felt like it.

"Look, Derek." Stiles began tiredly, his voice no longer full of anger but now fecund with the need to make Derek understand. "I don't _belong_ to anyone, okay? No matter what happens, okay, I'm going to always belong to myself. I make my own choices and I don't force others' choices. I've respected that with you and you better show me the respect I deserve and let me make my own goddamn choices since you've already made _your_ decision."

"But Stiles, I—"

"No, Derek. This is non-fucking-negotiable. This cannot be overridden with an alpha command, and if you did that, I wouldn't know who you were at all. Don't take this from me." He hated the pleading tone that crept into his voice. He shouldn't have to beg for something that should inherently be his. "Please don't take this from me. I haven't asked anything from you, don't take this from me."

Derek took a step back, like he hadn't realized how close he'd gotten in the heat of their argument. "Of course." He was shutting down, done with this now. Stiles could read the embarrassment across his face like a poem from the Romantic era, beautiful in its complexity, but often misunderstood.

"I'm sorry about this."

"Me too," Stiles said as Derek started to walk away. Stiles was sorry that Derek didn't want him. Stiles was sorry that he had to fight for his right to be with _other people_ when that felt so beyond _wrong_ to him, just because his mate didn't want to be with him. Stiles was sorry that he'd made a split second decision to mess with Derek and it went so badly. Stiles was selfishly sorry that everyone around him seemed to be finding a partner to go through life with and his had decided without telling him that they were better apart. Stiles was sorry he'd ever fallen for Derek Hale.

"I'm sorry too." He whispered again to the empty alley. He remembered the coffee in his hand, took a sip. It was still warm.

He got into his jeep by muscle memory alone and drove himself to school through the tears.

************************ Chapter 5 ******************************

If the continuous dreams and the stress about Derek weren't enough, the pack picked up a strange, ethereal scent in the woods a few days after his blow-out with the alpha. Stiles received the following text from Derek the next day: _Research Unicorns _and immediately jumped to it. He didn't have to like Derek at the moment to know that research was a priority over his anger any day. If Derek had proclaimed the strange scent a unicorn, then who was Stiles to argue? Derek's nose was more reliable on determining what the creature was than bucket loads of raw data that he would have to sort through to properly research. And if Derek was wrong, which wasn't out of the realm of possibility, it was better to eliminate the main contender before diving back into the search.

Unicorns, really? What was next? Bloodthirsty care bears on a mission from God? The things that wound up in Beacon Hills, seriously. Stiles shook his head, cracked his knuckles, dug some hidden snacks out of the kitchen and got down to business.

Four hours later when he was pulling himself out of a researching fugue state, Stiles felt a level of apprehension unusual even to the pack's previous experience with eliminating supernatural threats. While he was still contemplating the best way to go about taking this unicorn out, his window with the still broken lock swung up.

Without bothering to turn around, and in partial honesty, not wanting to have to look at Derek's perfection with the level of weirdness between them at the moment, Stiles gestured to the bed and read the last two or three articles in the texts Lydia hooked him up with on his birthday. Derek knew the drill and sat down to make himself comfortable, knowing that there was no point in trying to engage Stiles in conversation and/or demand answers until Stiles was 100% sure that his information was accurate and complete. After that time with the pixies and the difference between one letter in one word (it turns out the difference between "affect" and "effect" was actually relevant to real world situations), well, neither Derek nor Stiles wanted to repeat that experience.

Sure, Stiles was taking a bit longer than he needed and was gambling with time the pack didn't really have before the unicorn would come after them, but in his defense, things with Derek were just that level of awkward that he'd risk one of his pups getting gored to avoid having to make eye contact and talk to his alpha.

But he couldn't reliably call himself second in a pack of werewolves without being stupidly brave in the face of terror, so Stiles steeled himself for unpleasantness and jumped straight to business, which he knew Derek would appreciate. After all, he was always telling Stiles to shut up and get to the point.

"So unicorns are a thing," Stiles spun in his chair to face Derek who just gave him a _yeah, and…?_ face. "They aren't normally this aggressive, but with the death of their m—um, when their special buddy dies…" Oh, God, strike him down now. How was he going to talk about mother fucking _mates_ in front of Derek? Again. He should just put the elephant in the room in a clown nose, Nikes, and take pictures for posterity.

Stiles threw his head into his hands and lowered his head in between his spread knees. He would just have to spit it out, the faster he glossed over this part, the better. Direct eye contact would for sure kill him. Spontaneous combustion. That was a thing, he even researched it when they were dealing with that fire starter who had the thing for Lydia.

"As you probably know," he tried again, "unicorns are generally peaceful, revered in multiple cultures for their ability to calm those who lay eyes on them. But when their mates," and he barely stumbled over the word this time, still not looking at Derek, "are killed they, like many other creatures, go on a vengeance streak on whoever killed them. I suspect that Peter killed the mate and is trying to point the unicorn in the pack's direction since he can't really come back. Unicorns aren't known for their logic in their revenge and will usually push themselves to the point of exhaustion, some even die. But also like their sense of smell isn't so good? So I think they can't tell werewolves apart, but they can probably tell that a werewolf killed their mate and will try to just kill any werewolf that comes into their line of sight or smell."

He finished with a deep breath, allowing the feeling of lecturing Derek on something sweep him up into its normalcy.

"So what's the plan?" Derek asked quietly from the bed. Stiles made the mistake of looking up then and—shit. Why did he always think it was a good idea to let Derek sit on his bed? His bed! Where he slept and had special Stiles time and where he wanted Derek more than any other place in the world. Wow okay so bad idea. Stiles made a mental note to not let Derek sit there when he was this horny ever again. Horrible, horrible idea.

"Stiles?"

"Huh? Wha—? Oh sorry."

"The plan?"

"You're asking _me_ the plan?"

"Well usually I come up with a plan and you say it's stupid and come up with a completely different plan and we go with that anyway. I'm just going to let you do it this time."

Stiles was oddly touched. Yeah, it was another reminder that their dynamic had abruptly shifted, but at least Derek still trusted him enough to cede to his judgment on an important issue. They were still in this. Together. No matter how weird things got because of reasons. The pack came first and both of them recognized and were willing to make that the priority. They could do this.

He felt a small smile crawl onto his face. He offered it up like an olive branch. Derek's indescribable green eyes stared into his. Derek knew they were on the same page. This was what was so scary about this true mates stuff—moments like this where even when things are still weird and up in the air and beyond awkward, they could read each other.

"It's going to have to be you." Derek's eyebrows shot up in surprise and then Stiles realized how that probably sounded. "I mean about the unicorn. You're going to have to be the one that goes after the unicorn. That's what I meant." Derek's face carefully blanks enough, well, blank enough to fool anyone else. "Their horns have magic properties—they can either heal any wound or they can inflict maximum damage and render healing abilities useless. And according to like seven sources, so I'm pretty sure this is right, beta and omega wolves will heal from a unicorn horn gouging at regular human level, though some omegas have died outright. But an alpha will heal at like triple normal human speed, which is still slow for you."

Derek nodded his understanding. Even for a pretty taciturn dude, he was quiet today. Whatever, everybody deals differently. Stiles apparently just sticks his foot in his mouth repeatedly.

"That's why it has to be you. In fact, it's better if you just go alone, because no doubt Peter wants the pups to get in the way to like save you or something and get themselves killed. You kill it just how you'd think. Anyway really, you just have to make sure you cut the horn off when they're dead or they'll grow a new body out of the old one. Which is kinda gross and now makes me realize why your creepy uncle chose the unicorn in the first place. He's totally playing with us. He _wants_ you to know he's behind this." Stiles gives it a second of thought. "Well, no, actually he wants _me_ to know it's him. Ugh, bastard."

"Okay, I'll go now." Derek moved toward the window, prepared to jump back out.

"Are you kidding me, dude? You can't go alone. I'm going with you."

"No you aren't, you're staying here."

"Um, no I'm not and that's not even a little bit annoying, by the way."

"You just said the pack can't come."

"Yeah, the wolves can't. But you need backup in case you get injured, which let's face it dude, you can't do anything without injuring yourself, you just happen to heal fast enough that it's less noticeable."

Derek judiciously rolled his eyes. But he looked to be caving, so Stiles didn't begrudge him that. Instead he pressed his advantage, "No arguments. No one goes into the woods alone, remember? Your edict after the pixies, so yeah, I'm going. Let me text Allison where we'll be just in case." Stiles grabbed his jacket off the back of his desk chair, and followed Derek down the stairs, out the door, and into the Camaro.

They rode in silence up to the old Hale House, officially Stiles' least favorite place in Beacon Hills, possibly the world. Riding in silence has always been a special brand of torture to Stiles. Add on Derek's awkward turtle impression and the ten minute ride felt like thirty. This would be so much easier if Derek was like ugly. Or perhaps even normal looking. Yeah, Stiles would settle for normal looks, a flaw or two that he could focus on.

Derek sniffed the frigid air, his face turned north and he confirmed with a nod of his head that the unicorn was in that direction.

Stiles dared to ask how far. Derek held up two fingers and tugged his shirt off over his head. Stiles had to look away when the pants started to come off. He knew it was necessary, the alpha form tended to break clothes and Derek was already dangerously low on those, but he couldn't have given a warning or something? Jeezus. Stiles tried and failed not to stare at the mark on his shoulder, still taunting him as evilly as every other time he'd seen it. Derek pulled his necklace over his head next and without a word handed it to Stiles to put in his pocket before changing into the full alpha form and taking off.

Two miles went by quickly. Stiles could now run about eight miles before he needed to stop, running for your life was a great way to get in shape. Derek looped around him, keeping up with Stiles and pointing him in the right direction. When they got within a hundred yards, Derek nipped him in the ankle and sprang into action.

Alpha Derek in a fight was a thing of beauty—lightning in a storm, a sandstorm in the Sahara, a wild fire in Yellowstone—something dangerous and primal but so elegant that the human race long ago accepted it as a natural phenomenon and accorded it with proper respect and fear.

The unicorn held its own, rage lending it strength and purpose but slowing it in key strategic ways that Derek as a seasoned warrior took full advantage of. A minute into the fight Stiles knew the outcome. Derek would win.

Two minutes later, the alpha recognized the unicorn to be as nimble as a werewolf and seemingly resistant to claws. Derek reorganized his attack. He started going for the head, hoping to rip out its throat or snap its neck. The danger in that, though, was the glaringly obvious horn. Derek was putting himself into the danger zone and it made Stiles uncomfortable.

Derek managed to jump on its back, looking like a horse giving a wolf a ride which was probably the most ridiculous thing Stiles had ever seen and was now regretting not bringing the rest of the pack just so that they could witness this moment. He managed to snap a picture from his phone. The unicorn bucked, dislodging Derek who gave a reflexive swipe of his claws at the unicorn's exposed neck on his way down. The unicorn took advantage of Derek being on the ground and Stiles knew what was going to happen seconds before it actually did. He got gorged. Gored? Gouged? The horny unicorn… the unicorn's horn rammed into Derek's stomach.

Stiles flinched. The unicorn's horn was stuck in Derek stomach somehow. Those big claws grabbed the neck still connected to Derek and snapped the thing's neck. Stiles ran over, knowing to stay out of the fight until the threat was neutralized. No matter how helpful he thought he would be, the werewolves didn't need another person to protect.

First things first, Stiles pulled his hidden knife out of his shoe and cut the horn off, which while not the grossest thing he'd done for Derek was certainly not the most fun. He knew what the most fun thing he could do for Derek was…it included a lot of nudity.

Once the horn was separated, Stiles could ease the horn out of Derek's stomach. It wasn't healing, but they expected that. He put it in his other pocket, couldn't let hunters find that evidence.

"Dude, that does not look good."

"You think?"

"Better than you. C'mon, let's get you into clothes and out of here." Stiles looked him over, even like this Stiles needed a minute to bite back the arousal. Derek didn't need that right now. "Yeah, definitely clothes."

Stiles helped Derek limp back to the Hale House, which took markedly longer than it did to get out there with his own shirt pressed to the wound to stop the bleeding. By the time they reached the Camaro, the blood was starting to coagulate. Stiles helped Derek into the front seat and then zipped around to the trunk to look for the spare clothes the pack had learned the hard way to keep in every pack car's trunk. He pulled out one of his own shirts and collected Derek's clothes from the path. Derek wouldn't let Stiles help him get his pants back on, probably with good reason Stiles had to admit. Soon enough they were both clothed enough to leave.

Stiles carefully pulled the car out of the Hale driveway, mindful of Derek's concern. He hated, absolutely hated, to let anyone else drive his car but when it came down to it, his first choice was always Stiles. Stiles would take that as a compliment, but it was more a matter of trusting the rest of the pack _less_ than trusting Stiles _more_. It did help that Stiles knew how to drive a stick shift and an ornery one at that.

They flew down the road, Stiles talking a mile a minute to keep Derek from thinking too much about the pain he was in. For someone so used to being in battles and having horrible and painful things happen to him, Derek's reliance on his healing factor showed in moments like this when he was unable to heal—he was the worst patient Stiles had been in charge of, constantly angry, wouldn't say how much pain he was actually in, didn't want to rest the requisite amount, argumentative. Stiles had to pull out all the stops to get him to agree to go back to the Stilinski house in the first place. Derek trusted the pack completely, but it still made his wolf nervous to be around other wolves in his vulnerable position.

Stiles parked the Camaro behind his jeep, not knowing if his father would need to get out early in the morning or not. He went around to the passenger side to help Derek. Like some Twilight Zone version of a three legged race, they made it up to the front door. Stiles opened it slowly, checking for his dad.

He was at the table, rifling through papers. Stiles propped Derek up against the inside of the front door, grateful that he didn't have to hide this now. His dad knew and would help them.

"Stiles is that you?"

"Hi, Dad. Derek's here too. He's a bit injured so we're going to go get cleaned up, okay?"

"Injured?" Sheriff Stilinski looked out at them over the tops of his glasses. "I thought you said werewolves heal instantly. Like Wolverine."

Derek coughed. "You told your dad that we're like the Wolverine? Stiles."

"It was an analogy so he would get it, okay, yeesh, calm down, I swear to God."

"Stiles?" The Sheriff called, not looking up from his papers.

"Sorry, yeah, um usually they do? But Derek got gored by a rampaging unicorn so it's not going to heal." He replayed his words in his mind. "Okay so wow, that's like the weirdest sentence that's come out of my mouth that wasn't a lie."

"Rampaging unicorns?" His dad asked, a brow raised, in his bullshit calling voice.

"My uncle's fault," Derek told him from the other side of the room.

Stiles was ready to be out of this awkward situation. "Yup, dear old Uncle Creepy. So we'll be upstairs."

"Is Derek staying the night?" Oh no, his dad was using the concerned parent voice now. This wasn't good.

Stiles countered with the I'm-a-legal-adult voice. "Yes he is." And a compromise. "I'll make pancakes for breakfast, okay?"

"Extra syrup for me. Have fun boys."

"We're cleaning a wound, Dad. Not much fun to be had. Ugh." Stiles maneuvered Derek upstairs before he had to partake in more scintillating conversation with his sassy father.

He led them straight to the bathroom in the hall, left Derek sitting on the closed lid toilet, and grabbed clean underwear from his room.

Stiles pulled Derek's pants off slowly. Not because he was trying to be sexy, Stiles wouldn't know how to be sexy on purpose if his life depended on it, but he was careful of pulling the jeans off. If Derek had any other serious cuts from the horn under the denim, Stiles didn't want to aggravate them.

He stripped down and jumped under the water. With one foot in the shower, and the other on the bathroom floor, Stiles put his hands under Derek's armpits and hauled as hard as he could to get Derek up off the toilet. Together they managed to get the alpha under the spray as well.

He took his time on Derek's wound. Without knowing how much the werewolf healing would protect Derek from infection, Stiles didn't want to risk him healing the unicorn wound just for Derek to die from some supernatural bacteria or something. So he cleaned it thoroughly while Derek leaned against the wall of the shower, his arms splayed out to help him keep his balance.

Stiles tried to put his own lust out of his mind, he really did. But there was only so much denial a guy can fake before his wet and naked soul mate standing right fucking _there_ affected him. Ignoring it and hoping Derek would follow his lead, Stiles retrieved the shampoo and started washing Derek's dirt filled hair.

To his delight and surprise, Derek's smile twisted into an expression that could only be described as enraptured. He loved having his hair played with. Stiles tried to hide his smile, but Derek's eyes were closed anyway. He played with his hair for a lot longer than necessary, pushing the hair into a Mohawk, and then flattening it down again, scrubbing his scalp. Stiles brushed his soapy hands down Derek's skin, washing the loose dirt off him as best as he could. He wiped his arms, and made his way back up to Derek's scalp. He couldn't help but pause for a second on Derek's mark, fascinated by the sight of it, hypnotized. As he felt Derek stiffen a bit, he let his attentions wander back to Derek's head and kept petting him.

His fingers drifted down behind Derek's ears, and Derek moaned.

"Oh my God," Stiles kept scratching, "you totally love having your ears scratched, don't you?" Predictably, Derek didn't respond. "You're actually a wolf that sometimes becomes a human, aren't you? Admit it. You can tell me."

Derek turned vicious in his embarrassment. "You like it." He looked pointedly down at Stiles' semi.

He felt the earth move under him. "Wow, low blow, Derek. God." Stiles wasn't having fun anymore. See if he ever rubbed Derek's head for him again, seeing as how he _liked_ it too. But Stiles wasn't going around calling people out on ill-timed boners.

Stiles could see Derek regretted it, but he didn't want to hear his apology. He didn't want to hear how _sorry_ Derek was that he turned Stiles on. He didn't want to feel like a creeper forcing himself on a helpless victim, and that's exactly what Derek made him feel like, dirty.

"Okay, well as fun as this is…" Stiles washed the soap out of Derek's hair and washed his own as fast as humanly possible. He got out first, rubbed himself dry with his towel, threw his clean pair of underwear on, and grabbed a second towel from under the cabinet. He turned the water off, and towel dried Derek's hair a little harsher than strictly necessary, wiping down his arms and chest as well. Without looking, he tossed the towel around the alpha's hips and tied a neat knot so that the towel wouldn't slip off on their way back to Stiles' room. Heaven forbid there be nudity in a werewolf pack.

Stiles was mad. Stiles wasn't often mad, but when he did get to this point, there was no helping whoever was around him. In this case, Stiles was mad and hurt and embarrassed and that was the worst combination. Derek made him feel like a pervert. They were just having fun, nothing untoward. Derek didn't have to ruin it like that. It wasn't like Stiles didn't know that Derek didn't want him, that any reaction Derek had to him was just because they were mates, that the universe wanted Derek to want Stiles, but that didn't mean Derek wanted to want Stiles.

Whatever. Stiles wasn't going to do this anymore. Screw Derek. He could recover here, but then Stiles wasn't going to put up with him anymore. No more being the messenger between the pack and their alpha, no more going out of his way to do things Derek would like—making sure the pack didn't watch movies that would trigger Derek's troubled past, making sure he had choices within the pack, that he had a life outside the pack. No more.

They hobbled back to Stiles' room and Stiles perfunctorily dressed Derek in boxers. "You can have my bed," He bit out, not looking at his alpha, _unable_ to look at his alpha. His mate. "I'll be in the guest room down the hall."

Derek made a sound from the back of his throat that sounded suspiciously like a whine. Before Stiles could move away from the bed, Derek grabbed his hand. Not his wrist, or his forearm, or even his bicep. He grabbed his hand, and in the gentlest voice Stiles had ever heard Derek use, asked him to stay.

Stiles turned, his eyes meeting Derek's. His gaze was intense, the energy in it tenable, and Stiles felt all his defenses crumble. Damn it.

"Yeah, okay." Derek shifted over to the right side of the bed. _His_ side, Stiles thought back to their Jackson Hole vacation. Stiles climbed under the covers and tried to go to sleep.

And tried. And tried.

Sleep was not coming to him. Maybe it was the shower, undeniable proof that Derek wasn't unaffected. Maybe it was the closeness between them, they knew each other much better than before. Derek knew secrets about Stiles that even Scott didn't. Secrets even Lydia didn't know. In truth, Stiles realized an hour into not sleeping, he couldn't sleep because he'd finally accepted somewhere between the shower and this room that Derek was _it_ for him.

Sure, he'd known they were mates, true mates. But just because the universe designed him for someone, for Derek, didn't mean he had to be with him. The universe hadn't taken away his free will, and that's how Stiles had gotten through months and months of agony, knowing his mate and knowing his mate didn't want him.

Stiles had the choice to pick someone else, to live happily with someone else. Mates didn't even have to fall in love, they were just perfect complements of each other. Yin and Yang, a white tear drop next to a black tear drop, with a heart that reflected the other.

He sighed, he couldn't help it. He didn't even want to. He was frustrated, surely Derek was frustrated too, and if they didn't talk about this soon, Stiles was going to go crazy.

He was about to speak, about to put it out there, no going back, but Derek beat him.

"I like it." He said, out of nowhere. Stiles was pretty good about following his train of thought, putting two minimal sentences together and getting what Derek actually meant outside of what he said. But this wasn't registering to Stiles.

"Like what?"

Derek turned towards him, lying on his left side and staring at Stiles from much closer than was comfortable. "I like when I can smell you want me."

Stiles' mouth gaped open. He had to remind himself that what Derek said didn't necessarily mean that he wanted Stiles _back_. It could just be his little known narcissistic streak.

"I like knowing your body wants me," Derek continued, his face strangely devoid of expression. "Even if _you_ don't. I like knowing some part of my mate wants me, even if it's just physical."

"What makes you think," Stiles' voice trembled in an unmanly fashion, but he was secure that Derek wouldn't bring it up later. "What makes you think that I only want you physically, Derek?"

Derek didn't respond. "Have I ever come onto you, made you feel uncomfortable with my… with my _feelings_?"

"You don't smell like love around me, you smell like lust," Derek argued.

Stiles didn't know how to respond. Can you smell love? And if you can, why hasn't Derek smelled it coming from him in huge tsunami waves? There was something wrong with this, Stiles thought, some underlying issue that Stiles had touched on unconsciously that was making Derek feel like this, whatever this was.

"How do you know what love smells like, Derek?" He was careful, so so careful in his tone of voice.

Derek looked to the side, a great pain warping his face. "I was in love once."

Stiles carefully controlled his reaction. Little starbursts of jealousy, anger, and rage burst in his gut, but he smothered them down. This wasn't about him, he knew, and if Derek was in love it was a long time ago, before he met Stiles.

"What happened?"

A tear ran down from the corner of Derek's eye and into the sheets. This scared Stiles more than anything else in this conversation. "She burned my house down."

Gob smacked, Stiles decided, was the best description for how he felt at that statement. Utter horror and realization followed quickly and Stiles put the story together in his mind.

Kate Argent seduced Derek. Kate Argent got her nasty talons all over Derek when he was, what, fifteen? Sixteen? He couldn't have been any older than that.

"Kate." Stiles whispered, and Derek nodded. He looked so young in that moment, like what he must have looked like when she was manipulating him into helping her kill his entire family.

"We were in love. I met her at the pool, she was a life guard." Stiles didn't want to hear this, he really didn't want to hear this. "She told me she liked my eyes, and after her shift she took me behind the pool house and we had sex."

Stiles fought back the emotions whirling in him. He had to get through this conversation. Derek needed him to get through this, to help him. Derek wouldn't tell him this unless he wanted Stiles to understand.

"And I don't smell like she smelled when you two were together?"

Derek shook his head, his eyes huge. "What do I smell like?"

"I told you," Derek was frustrated again, "you smell like lust."

"What else do I smell like?"

Derek's face seemed confused, but he was used to answering questions from Stiles that seemed like they weren't important. "You smell like you. Like pack and lust and bubblegum."

"Bubblegum?" Stiles didn't know if he was offended or amused. "The pink kind?"

"Does it matter?"

"It does to me." Stiles' manliness was in question. What kind of useless idiot smelled like bubblegum? He was in mid-rant in his own mind, when something occurred to him.

"Derek?"

"Uh-huh?"

"Where else have you smelled bubblegum?"

Derek looked at him questioningly. "I've never thought about it before, give me a second."

Werewolves had a lot of smells to filter through every second of every day. Stiles should be flattered that Derek knew his scent so well, but then again, he was lying a foot from him.

"My mother. She always smelled a bit like bubblegum. My dad a bit, too."

Now they were getting somewhere. Stiles rather thought his inkling was right. "And who else?"

Derek thought longer this time. "Well everyone in the pack smells a little like it, but I put that down to you touching them and scenting them like you do sometimes."

Stiles shook his head. "No, I don't think so. Tell me, have I always smelled like bubblegum?"

Derek blinked. "No. You used to smell like anger and sadness a lot. You didn't gain that smell until this last year." Derek still didn't get it.

"Derek, think about it. Everyone in the pack has a mild smell of bubblegum, but your mom and I smell like it the most. What can you infer from that?"

"I don't—what are you—"

"Love, you idiot. That bubblegum smell you keep smelling? It's not actual bubblegum. It's people's love. God, what do I see in you?"

"Kate didn't smell like bubblegum."

"Yeah because Kate didn't love you!" Stiles finally cracked. "She wanted to kill you and your family because she thought you were monsters. She never loved you, Derek. She was manipulating a young boy."

"I get that, you idiot, thanks. I was just putting it together," Derek grumbled. "Kate didn't smell like bubblegum, she smelled like guns and metal."

They sat in silence for a minute or two, neither really knowing where to go after that. Finally Stiles broke the silence. "So, uh, I guess it's kind of obvious now that I want you more than physically."

Stiles turned back over to lie on his back, not sure if he could watch while Derek rejected him after literally dissecting his love.

"Why didn't you say anything? Derek asked. "I've been waiting for you to bring up the mates thing since you told me to cover up the mark. You've only ever hinted at it."

Stiles took a deep breath. "Normally I have no problem bringing up uncomfortable things with you, things that aren't my place to worry about as second, things that only the alpha should deal with. But this?" Stiles reached around on the bed to grab Derek's hand. "This felt like something the alpha would have to bring up. I mean, you're the intended wolf. This is about you, I was born _for you_." He let out a humorless laugh, "I just thought if you wanted your prize or whatever, you'd claim it."

Derek huffed and Stiles interpreted it in his Derek Dictionary as an amused sound.

"But Stiles," Derek teased, "I thought you were supposed to claim me?" He turned his head so Stiles would have a clear view of the mark meant for him.

He hadn't really had a chance to study it before, he only briefly looked over it in the shower, but with Derek's invitation, he took his time looking at it. The mark was quite beautiful. If it were a Rorschach inkblot, Stiles would have said it looked like a wolf howling at the moon surrounded by a ring, but then again, Stiles was a bit biased towards wolves.

The hand hold Derek's let go and found the mark. He traced the ring around it, coming closer to Derek unconsciously. "It tickles when you touch it," Derek whispered. "It's part of why I freaked out in the shower, I wasn't expecting that."

Stiles whispered a few minutes later, his heart in his throat, "I'd claim you the second you gave permission."

Derek smiled softly, and for the first time ever, Stiles saw true happiness on his face. He'd seen Derek happy before, mostly around the pack or when he got a good jab in against Stiles. He'd seen him amused. He'd seen him content, but not truly happy. Never like this.

He lunged towards Stiles, meeting his pink lips against Stiles'. Their kiss went much like their conversations: it was an argument and a confession and a confidence. It was intense and it was for just the two of them. There was no winner, neither of them dominated the other. They were equals, partners, two hands of the same body.

Derek licked into Stiles' mouth, meeting his tongue, hot and wet and deliciously perfect. Stiles groaned into Derek's mouth. He scraped his tongue along Derek's teeth, eager to know every inch of him. Derek allowed it and then took his turn to explore, tracing Stiles' lips, bizarrely fixated on Stiles' top lip where the Cupid's bow was at its peak arch.

A hand crept up Stiles' side, too intimate to be ticklish, but raising goose bumps anyway. Derek's fingers found his nipple, his thumb rubbed back and forth across the nub and Stiles arched. Obviously Stiles had not spent enough attention on those during Super-Secret Stiles Time.

The encounter gained intensity, heat, passion, and Derek moved to put himself on top of Stiles, but then he groaned in pain. He fell back onto his side of the bed with his hand covering the wound slightly healed still in his stomach.

"Oh, shit. You okay?"

Derek nodded. "Just a little embarrassed."

"Dude," Stiles whispered against his mate's lips, "that's like my default setting these days."

Any lingering embarrassment lifted off Derek's face when he smiled back at Stiles, letting his affection shine in his eyes.

"We'll just sleep for now, okay? I just want to sleep with you. Flip over, I'm gonna spoon the shit out of you."

He didn't take the alpha's grumblings seriously, since he flipped over faster than lightning, checking over his shoulder and glaring at Stiles like he should already be pressed against him.

"Alright, calm down. I'm just taking in the view." Stiles put his arms around Derek, and like that they fell asleep with Stiles' nose in his mate's tattoo.

He woke up sometime later in foggy stages, coming from a sleep so deep it could have fortified him for a week. Beneath his nose, warm skin tickled and stretched tight across his mate's shoulder blades. The tattoo that taunted him for so long looked edible, and Stiles, just awake enough to know what he was doing, tentatively licked it.

The body in front of him shifted, Derek's boxer clad ass coming back farther to meet Stiles' erection. The friction in that alone would have made Stiles shoot off in his earlier teenage years. Stiles felt his hand creep across Derek's stomach without his permission. He absentmindedly noticed the wound had closed, yet not completely healed, as his fingertips slid upwards, ever upwards. Derek's stomach shivered beneath his touch, sparks like static electricity bouncing back and forth between them.

Without a doubt Derek was now awake too. Stiles' nimble fingers found his alpha's left nipple and began to toy with it, much like Derek had done to him earlier. Slowly, his mouth migrated from the tattoo around to Derek's neck, marking his path like a treasure map. Twelve paces to the first checkpoint.

Derek's stubble scratched Stiles' nose and lips as he explored the enticing jugular in front of him. Derek began to squirm under him, his hips reaching outwards for friction in vain and whimpering quietly at the empty air in front of him. Stiles clucked a laugh into Derek's ear, his tongue teasing the earlobe and Derek moaned aloud.

When Derek had taken as much teasing from Stiles as he could stand, the alpha used his superior strength to flip them, Stiles finding the larger man atop him in under a second and with no complaints. Derek grabbed hold of his wrists and slowly brought his hands to rest above his head, between his Power Ranger pillow and the headboard. Those emerald eyes met his with a questions and permission and pleasure and ecstasy and Stiles was drowning in it all.

Derek held his hands above him with just one hand and allowed his other to slip below Stiles' underwear to grab him tightly. He just went straight for it, to Stiles' surprise and began stroking his hand up and down, sending Stiles' eyes back into his head and his tongue to loll about his teeth with a mind of its own.

"Please, Derek." Stiles begged without knowing what it was he was asking for. Please make me come, perhaps? Or please love me? It was both and less and more and layers deep—things between them would never be simple, yet they would always be simple. Mate is mate is mate. Stiles has castigated the Beckett pack for their simplicity on the issue, but maybe it was Stiles who had gotten this one wrong.

A true mate was a true mate. Derek was his other half, his better half, his conscience, and his mark by which to measure all other things.

And currently his mate's head was descending upon his hard cock, dispensing with both their underwear.

Derek let go of Stiles' wrists to hold his hips instead. Stiles' newly freed fingers migrated to Derek's black hair and took up residence there, strands of fine hair held captive between his fingers.

Meanwhile, Derek's tongue grazed the head of Stiles' dick so tenderly that Stiles only knew he'd been touched by the lightning shooting up his spine. He took more in, sucking delicately on the head and looking up at Stiles under the hood of his eyes, desperate for reassurance and love.

Stiles threw them back at him in triplicate. He tried to show how much he liked it through his words, "Yeah, more, oh my _God_, you aren't real. You cannot be real. Oh my God, Derek," as well as the truth that conquered his eyes and put up little flags declaring they ruled the land they'd won. There wasn't anything inside Stiles that he could hold back away from Derek now even if he wanted to. Which he didn't.

He wanted Derek to know about his fantasies, he wanted Derek to know about the trouble he gave his second grade teacher, he wanted Derek to know how it felt to watch his mother die slowly, he wanted Derek to know how he felt when he stuck three fingers inside himself and thought desperately of his mate. He wanted Derek to have all of him, everything. There wasn't a lewd thought, a praise, a compliment, anything that he could hold back in this moment.

Derek sucked them all out of his hard-on.

Finally, Stiles had enough. He wanted even more than this from Derek. Already he'd received more from his mate than he'd ever dared to dream, and he was going to demand _more._

Stiles pulled Derek's head back by his hair and looked him straight in the eye. "Up, get up. We have more to do than just this. C'mon, get up here."

When Derek finally joined him on the Power Ranger pillow, Stiles nudged him until the alpha got the picture and flipped onto his stomach. He nipped the tattoo, unable to leave it alone after so many many months of seeing it every time he dared close his eyes, and felt his mouth move liquidly along the line of Derek's spine. At the peak of his ass, Stiles hesitated. He was about to do something he'd only ever thought about when dreaming. It was like if he could have these wildest fantasies with Derek, that the domestic stuff would work itself out. Like if Derek would allow Stiles to have _this,_ then he'd allow him anything.

When he saw from Derek's face that he'd been granted permission to continue, Stiles smiled a mischievous smile. He pressed his thumbs along the crack of the World's Most Impressive Ass (patent pending) and spread the cheeks to get a better view of what he was working with.

Derek whimpered and Stiles took pity on him. How vulnerable he must feel, Stiles thought, to be so dissected, spread open, ready to be pleasured. So Stiles put him out of his misery and put his tongue on that tiny little hole.

He licked around it, slowly building his courage to spear it in. Derek's reaction was worth it when he finally started a penetrative rhythm, in and out for as long as his jaw could take it. Derek fingers clawed at the headboard, leaving trails of gored wood in their wake. He scrunched up the sheets, he screamed into the pillow. And Stiles caused all of it, he soaked it Derek's reactions and smiled into his mate's ass, tongue working furiously. Eventually, Stiles' own libido spoke so loud it couldn't be ignored and Stiles went about the process of preparing Derek to take him.

They hadn't spoken about it, but Stiles had to _claim_ his intended wolf, and he was planning on doing just that. "Derek, I'm going to get the lube, okay?" He told his alpha after coming up for air, surprised at how achey his jaw already was after just a few minutes of pleasuring his partner. He would have to practice.

"Yeah, okay." Derek replied back, completely wrecked. "Are you going to—I want you to—"

"You want me to what?" Stiles asked from scrambling around the contents of his nightstand drawer. "You gotta use your words, Derek. That's the whole reason we haven't been doing this for months."

Derek always was one for a Stilinski imposed challenge. "I want you to fuck me this time," He said, eyes burning into Stiles' whisky eyes "and maybe I'll fuck you later."

Stiles fumbled with the newly discovered lube. It flew out of his hands and hit Derek on the crown of his head.

"Uh, yeah." He said, hiding his blush while looking for the bottle. He literally just had his tongue inside Derek's ass, why did the blunt words affect him like this? "Yeah, we can. That. Let's do that. I've got—I've got lube, so yeah. Let's."

"Stiles." Derek said fondly, shaking his head a little and then looking pointedly at his own ass when Stiles didn't start moving.

Luckily Stiles was quick on his feet and responded immediately. He gathered the liquid on his fingers, took a second look at it and doubled it, then carefully put one finger up to the hole that was already a little bit stretched. Derek turned his head around and kissed Stiles simply, chastely. The dichotomy of fingering him while focusing on this almost virginal kiss chipped away at Stiles' patience. One finger slowly became two and two turned into three rather quickly. Stiles was mentally debating a fourth when Derek lost his own patience and demanded Stiles fuck him now or never.

"Alpha Hale, I choose you."

Stiles did not expect the soft chuckle that escaped from Derek at his comment. "I can't tell if that was supposed to be a Pokémon joke, or your idea of a romantic thing to say."

"God, you're such an asshole." Stiles smiled from above Derek, lining his cock up with the hole.

"You like my asshole."

"I like everything about you, despite you being an asshole."

Derek winced slightly as he was penetrated. "Now _that_ was romantic."

Stiles was totally never going spelunking if having sex was anything like exploring caves. He'd heard so many metaphors over the years along those lines, and just no. If a cave was a tight as Derek, he'd suffocate. God, but Derek was _so_ tight. And hot. And perfect.

Stiles wanted to sink into him and just be. Just exist on a different plane and chill out for a few hundred years. He never wanted to be apart from him. Stiles sunk to the hilt and looked up at Derek, shocked eyes meeting shocked eyes.

"Feels amazing," Derek grit out.

"Couldn't have said it better myself," Stiles grunted, exaggeratedly slowly pulling out again, already mourning Derek's hole.

"I'm not going to break, Stiles. Fucking shove it in me hard. I'll heal!"

"Just because you'll heal doesn't mean I want to hurt you, you idiot." Derek wouldn't take no for an answer. He put both his hands on Stiles' ass and pushed him back in, both of them overloading on the pleasure.

Back and forth, back and forth, they rocked in tandem, chasing that light at the end of the tunnel. Stiles could feel his orgasm rapidly approaching, closer and closer until he just had to take one more step before he'd cross over the peak.

Wanting Derek to come with him, Stiles brought his hand down and around to jerk him off, his grip probably all wrong for what Derek liked best, but sure it would work in the interim. Just as Stiles was _there_, he was riding the wave, an explosion of white appeared behind his suddenly closed eyes and he just—he bit down blindly. Exactly on the mark on Derek's neck.

Beneath him he felt Derek cry out and they were both beyond gone, spent and satisfied and panting for each other.

Stiles collapsed on top of Derek and couldn't properly move to get off of him for at least two minutes. Whatever, Derek was a super powerful werewolf, he would survive.

Their chests expanded and contracted in time together, slowing considerably until only Stiles was still out of breath. Stupid werewolf recovery time.

Sleep overtook him again, pure exhaustion rolling off him in waves. "So sleepy," Stiles thought he heard himself say.

"Yeah," A ghost of Derek replied to the room at large, "so tired. Mhh, G'night, my love."

Yes, it must have been a ghost.

*************************Chapter 5*******************************

If Stiles was not allowed to get a full night's sleep after this, he was going to kill somebody. Somebody who was currently calling him at, he looked at his alarm clock over Derek's spiky head, 4:26 on a Saturday morning. "Ugh, shut up, shut up!"

"Din't do 'thing, Stiles," Derek mumbled into the pillow, turning away from Stiles as if to punish him by removing that glorious body.

It totally didn't work. "Not you. Phone. Ringing." Stiles heard it coming from his side of the room, somewhere on the floor and knew it wasn't his phone by the ringtone—he would never use a _generic_ tone for anybody. Except maybe a known telemarketer.

"It's yours," Stiles protested, crawling closer to Derek to re-gain the warmth, "you gotta answer it."

"'M sleeping."

"So'm I. It's your phone."

"Stiles, please?"

Stiles really hated that he didn't hate him in that moment. "Fine, but you owe me. And I totally get to make you owe me sexual favors now. That's a thing you can't take back."

He got up to cross the floor to pick up the stupid phone when Derek reached to grab his hand, reminiscent of earlier that evening when this whole thing started. As far as Stiles was concerned, Derek could grab him anytime. "No take backs," Derek grinned sleepily.

Stiles felt his face flush. No one else could possibly have this effect on him this early in the morning. Even in the height of his Lydia days, her running naked through his bedroom would not have made him wake up enough to answer a call that wasn't his.

"No take backs."

He picked the phone out of Derek's jean pockets. That poor little Nokia had seen some days, alright. Caller ID said Scott. Oh, perfect.

"Hello? Scott? What's up?"

"Stiles?" Scott sounded flabbergasted. "What are you doing answering Derek's phone?"

"There was a thing—a unicorn thing. It's taken care of now. That reminds me, I've got a hilarious picture to show you guys later."

"The scent was a _unicorn_? And you guys killed it? Stiles, how could you?"

Stiles sighed, using his free hand to rub his eyes. "So not the point right now, Scotty. Why are you calling?"

"Oh, right. It's my night to patrol because I had to switch with Boyd—his parents, you know? Anyway, so I was over by the old motel off by the interstate when I caught a weird smell."

"Not a unicorn smell, I take it?" Stiles looked at the lump of covers on his bed, Derek's face was peaceful but he wasn't fooling anyone. As soon as he identified the caller as Scott, Derek knew there was an emergency and he'd need to be alert. Those cute little ears were catching every word.

"No, man. It's wolfy, but not anyone I've met before."

"Maybe an _actual_ wolf? Like is that too much to hope for? I read an article about California's first wolf returning and—"

"Stiles," Scott called, pulling him back on track. "It's a werewolfy smell, okay? I mean, I know that much."

"Oh, God. We so did not need this right now. Like one thing after the other." Stiles looked to Derek, waiting for instructions. Derek nodded at him, getting out of bed and scrambling back into his black boxers. Stiles mourned the loss. "Okay. Scott?"

"Yeah, I'm listening. What's the plan?"

"Get Jackson over there with you and try to trace it as far as you can, if you run into a werewolf you've gone too far, alright? Don't approach them until we're all there. Well, at least Derek, okay?"

"Yeah, okay. I'm calling Jackson first. You want me to call anyone else?" Scott always made these emergency situation calls _way_ too fucking long and Stiles had no patience to deal with this now.

"No, I'll get everyone where they need to be. You just wait for His Scaliness. By that sketch motel on Oak Grove? Is that where you are?"

"Yeah."

"Yeah, okay wait there. Give Jackson like ten minutes, he's not too far."

Stiles hung up without saying goodbye, already knowing Scott would give him passive aggressive hell about it later.

Stiles caught Derek poking at his unicorn wound in the reflective surface of his TV while he was ostensibly supposed to be putting his shirt back on. Derek looked a little contrite when he saw Stiles watching him.

"We don't have time for you to sit there staring at me."

Stiles snorted. "We don't have time for you to sit there staring at yourself, either, Mr. Macho." Stiles was already dialing the next number. "You get on over there, I'll catch everyone up."

"Yeah, I'll go. Scott and Jackson are bound to do something stupid without adult supervision."

"Bye, honey." Stiles kissed his cheek, still not getting an answer from Erica. He would try Isaac next.

"Wow, no." Derek called as he opened the window, the broken lock looking less and less like the wound between them that Stiles had always imagined it to be and more and more like the catalyst that set the whole thing up.

Less than an hour and a cumulative thirty minutes of phone time later (mostly spent listening to a ringing tone because these stupid werewolves don't pick up their fucking phones these days), Stiles hunkered down next to Allison while she restrung her bow, Lydia picking at her pristine nails in the periphery. He placed his emergency backpack on the patch of grass next to him, within arm's reach.

In the ravine below them, the pack had pushed the invading wolves (six of them, according to Derek's text) down this stretch of land and he, Lyds, and Allison were far enough out of the way to keep the werewolves' minds on the fight and not on protecting their mates.

Besides, Allison needed the distance to be most effective and Lydia and Stiles' quick minds worked best with a little space between them and the problem.

It started with Jackson. A lot of fights through Stiles' short eighteen years have started with Jackson, but these days they're on the same side and it follows there should be _less_ fighting. But Jackson never did follow the rules.

Jackson and Scott had been the main instigators of pushing the invading pack towards Derek and the others, waiting in the ravine from downwind, their scent hidden. Scott, good at following directions these days, well, better than _Jackson_ anyway, kept to the plan and led them straight to the heart of the pack. The king of the dicks, on the other hand, got a little too excited and broke off a quarter mile early, going for the easy target, a small Asian girl with a bit of a dopey face.

Stiles cursed under his breath and could swear he saw Derek do the same. Jackson learned his lesson quickly. In werewolf packs, the smallest does not necessarily mean the weakest. This was something Derek hounded into the pack because as they'd all been bitten and not born, their tendency was to equate size with strength.

Derek was always quick to remind them that Erica was the deadliest beta in the pack and none of them were eager to try to take her on, but for some reason that tendency in humanity to stubbornly stick to what one's always known was in full effect.

The thing that Stiles couldn't put his finger on, that sense of wrongness about this fight, the itch on the center of his back that he couldn't reach—he found it the exact same time as Lydia.

"Alpha!" She cried to his left, confirming his suspicions. He'd thought maybe he just couldn't see the other pack's alpha in the scuffle—flailing bodies that didn't sit still long enough for each to be inventoried and catalogued. Lydia was right, as ever. _The other pack was fighting with no alpha._

It was like they were asking to lose.

"You're right, Lyds. Why wouldn't their alpha be here?" Her regal head looked over the scene, Stiles followed her eyes, trying to see the same thing she was. If anyone could figure this shit out, it was Lydia. She could get into anybody's head—freshman girls, captain of the lacrosse team, overly sympathetic gym teachers, bi-curious sophomore boys with a weakness for green eyes…

"Look at them, Stiles," She pointed, a new revelation in her eyes, waiting for him to catch up. "They're aren't _fighting_."

"What do you mean?" Stiles handed another arrow to Allison as she mechanically reached behind her, knowing Stiles would readily supply her.

"I mean," She explained, slightly exasperated but too caught up in the action of the moment to really commit to the annoyance, "that these wolves have _no fight_ in them. Sure, they're fighting. But look at them." Once again she looked out to the wolves below them, trying to make Stiles understand.

"Oh, my God, you're right." She crooked a brow at him. "Oh course you're right, duh. I just meant, ah, in a, you know, _I get it now_ kind of way."

The other wolves were indeed fighting, but it was like their joints were mechanical or something. It was like they were puppets, or—no! It was like they were high school students who were forced to do some dumb activity that they didn't agree with that they went along with for the sole purpose of not getting expelled or something. The Sacramento pack was the Breakfast Club of the werewolf world.

Stiles had to congratulate himself on that one. He was never going to be able to remember their actual name now.

The Breakfast Club didn't have their hearts in the fight. Not like Stiles' pack did. They weren't fighting for their home, their family, their _pack._

The teenage girl part of Stiles' brain whispered to his heart, that some of them were fighting for their _mates_. He felt like pinching himself after that. He couldn't believe he'd thought that. God, there was happy with his new relationship and then there was _sappy_ and God damn it if he crossed that line.

He actually did pinch himself on the inside of his wrist. Just to remind himself who was boss.

"—do, Stiles?"

"Huh, what? I didn't do anything." His arms flailed and he almost lost his balance. He fell onto his palms to steady himself.

Lydia rolled her eyes, so done with his shit. Stiles immediately felt bad. He hadn't even been trying to annoy her with his shit today. It was the gift again. Some people just had it.

"I know you didn't do anything, you idiot. I'm asking what we should do."

Stiles pulled himself together. He was back in charge again. Well, second in charge. His pack was counting on him to come up with something brilliant, to have a strategy that would see them all out of this alive.

"We tell Derek not to kill them. Aim to capture. And then we interrogate them. Something isn't right, here, and we have to find out what that is. There's just too much—" he fumbled for the right word, his fingers twirling in the air, hoping Lydia would put him out of his misery. "You know, like—"

"Coincidence," Allison supplied thankfully, not taking her aiming eye off the other pack and already invoking his new orders.

"Thanks, boo."

He got to his feet, knowing that anything drastic he did would gain Derek's attention, even if he didn't mean to. Luckily this time he did.

"Derek," he called, his voice no louder than when he was talking to Lydia. "They have no alpha, something's up. Let's capture them and ask what it is."

Derek nodded from the field of battle and Stiles could just make out his voice issuing commands on the fly. The difference wasn't really that apparent at first, Stiles noted, as his wolves weren't exactly cold blooded killers and hadn't really been trying to kill the others, but stop them from coming any closer to town. Stiles would have words with them about that later. If a threat is on pack territory, neutralize it and _then_ feel sorry about it. There was no time to feel guilty before they'd even acted.

Quickly, with their new orders, Isaac, Derek, Erica, Boyd, Jackson, and Scott rounded up the rest of the wolves and put the fear of God in them. Or something like that.

Derek roared them into submission, dropping to their knees at his feet while his betas held them down, Scott keeping track of the crafty Asian girl and the motorcycle chick he'd been fighting all along.

Stiles waited until they were secure and then scuttled down the hill, Lydia and Allison flanking him. He liked to use words like "flanking" while they were in the middle of fighting, it made him feel like they were military rogues or something. He had a fantasy or two about the pack fighting off the zombie apocalypse. So what?

By the time the humans joined their wolves on the battlefield, the Breakfast Club pack was subdued. Stiles threw his emergency bag onto the ground and pulled out a length of wolfsbane rope, cleverly invented by Deaton. It was just regular rope that had a bit of wolfsbane imbued into the rope as it was twined together. But it could subdue an alpha if properly applied. Stiles knew that for sure, he'd tested it out on Derek for science.

Stiles handed one end of the rope to Allison, who sized up the dorky looking blond teenager (Stiles wasn't really one to talk but, yeesh…) and started sawing off about eight feet of the rope with her boot knife.

Lydia helped Stiles cut the other end, doling out six equal sections of rope, one for each wolf. Stiles knew Allison had more knowledge in apprehending werewolves, so he handed the rope over as soon as he and Lydia had severed it and Allison went to town.

She left their legs and feet free so they could walk, but their hands were immoveable with the combination of the wolfsbane and how tight she'd tied them.

An hour and a headache later, Stiles and Derek were closing up the door to the basement under the old Hale House.

"Do you think what she said was true?" Stiles asked as soon as they were far enough away that the invading wolves wouldn't hear.

Derek walked along at Stiles' pace, heading for his car. Boyd and Erica would stay in the basement with the tied up wolves until Scott and Jackson relieved them. Scott got to sleep for a bit since he'd been up patrolling all night. Isaac and Cora, who was the only wolf Stiles couldn't make contact with before the fight, would take over watching them after Scott and Jackson's turn.

Meanwhile, Stiles and Derek were going to hunt Peter down once and for all.

"You mean do I believe that my uncle killed their alpha, took over their pack, forced them to run here and try to kill us without joining in on the fight like the coward that he is? Yes, Stiles, I absolutely believe that. And you do too." Derek cupped Stiles on the back of the neck fondly while they continued to walk to the car, now in sight. "Besides, her heartbeat says she was telling the truth."

Stiles nodded, the movement causing Derek's fingers on his neck to caress his skin, sending shivers down his spine. "So where do we start? Looking for him, I mean."

"It would really have helped if they knew where he was staying, but I guess we'll have to trace their steps back to the last time they saw him and then go from there."

"He'll try what he did last time, leaving a false trail. We can't count on following the scent to his current hide-out. He's too smart for that."

Derek took out his keys and unlocked the door. Stiles opened the passenger door and started to get in, when Derek paused. "You drive," he said, almost under his breath.

"What? Why?"

"You drive and I'll hang my head out the window and try to catch his scent."

"Like a dog? Did I really fuck you so hard you lost your mind?" Stiles felt a foolish grin form on his face, "Because I gotta admit, that's kinda hot."

Derek rolled his eyes and tried to keep the smile off his ridiculously good looking face. He walked around the car to get in on the passenger side, but Stiles had yet to move out of the way. His alpha came up and gently pulled him away from the door.

Derek's lips sought his out, like going this long without kissing him was a sin. The tongue that launched a thousand wet dreams (okay, or like four months worth of mate dreams) played with his upper lip. Stiles was losing his mind with how bad he wanted Derek. Like all the time. Even after they'd fucked or had sex or, shit, _made love_ last night, his libido wasn't satisfied—it was _hungrier_.

Derek pulled out of the kiss and unclenched Stiles' fingers from his shirt, dropping the keys in them. "Go on, I trust you."

Stiles couldn't speak. He covered it up by following orders, reluctantly leaving Derek's side to walk around to the driver's side.

They spent the next few hours driving around the streets of Beacon Hills, searching for the scent. When they ruled out all the roads, Derek called Jackson out to help them search the surrounding woods. Looking for Peter in the woods, just hoping to come across his scent was a bit like searching for a needle in a haystack, but Stiles was tired of being on the defensive with Peter. He was tired of reacting to Peter.

It was time to get rid of this threat. Peter had now tried to murder his mate, his father, and now his pack, for the second time. He needed to go, like, the first time he died.

Stiles dropped Jackson and Derek off at one spot in the woods, going to grab them lunch before meeting at a pre-determined spot—Derek's favorite training meadow.

He bought nine burgers for the three of them and high-tailed it back, keeping an eye out for suspicious behavior. Well, suspicious behavior that looked like it had something to do with Peter. He was pretty sure old Mrs. Flanagan's attempt to shoplift from the general store across the street from Maybelle's had nothing to do with Peter.

When Stiles had to go back to Maybelle's for a take away dinner for the wolves, he figured maybe they needed to give up for now. Stiles' dad was sitting in uniform in the diner when he got there, his face blank at the bloody burger slathered in mayonnaise on his plate, but giving off a vibe of guilt. Stiles stared him down until he pushed the plate away and asked Maybelle for the house salad in his resigned voice.

Stiles smiled, at least something was going right today. He slipped into the booth across from his dad while he waited for the twelve burgers he ordered to be ready. "Long day, huh?"

His dad smiled tightly. "Yeah, so many deputies are on vacation right now that I can't leave. Mrs. Flanagan was shoplifting again and now Officer Smeldon tells me she's pregnant and will have to go on maternity leave in about six months, and—"

"Oh my God! Sandra's preggers?!"

"What did I tell you about calling her Sandra?"

Stiles felt affronted, "Not to let her catch me, duh."

The sheriff sighed, long suffering. "Something like that, I guess."

"Look Dad, there's something you should know," Stiles began, apprehension coloring his voice.

Sheriff Stilinski rubbed his eyes, sliding the plate with the burger on it back to him and taking a bite. "Okay, now I'm ready. Lay it on me. Is it vampires? Please tell me it's not vampires. I don't think my heart can handle eternal boyfriends or whatever the hell that Twilight stuff was about."

Stiles loved his dad, truly. "No vampires. Just Peter. So less eternal boyfriends and more like eternal assholes." Stiles stuttered over the word boyfriend, not about to touch _that_ issue right now.

"Oh, great. Just what I need. Is he going to try to kidnap me again?"

"Probably not. He'd most likely just outright kill you at this point. Make sure you have your gun on you at all times. And if you have any of those bullets from Chris Argent that you tried to hide from me, you should probably put those in your gun."

"Lovely." The sheriff replied and took another enormous bite of his burger. Stiles just let it go.

They didn't find Peter in the woods that night. They didn't find Peter by the Depot. They didn't find Peter around the old house. And they certainly didn't find Peter in town.

They found him as they always do: exactly where and when he wanted them to find him.

Derek and Stiles left the woods around late evening, both exhausted from running on little sleep. Stiles called the next rotation to watch over the Breakfast Club pack, and they silently agreed to return to the Stilinski house to get the requisite amount of sleep to be able to keep going the next day.

Stiles started to get out of the car when Derek's strong arm shot across his chest, pinning him back into his seat.

"What is it?" He asked, taking in Derek's searching eyes that were focusing on the house.

The arm came away slowly, but, well, it was more of a warning than anything else. Derek didn't want to _keep_ Stiles where he was, rather, he just wanted to make him aware that there was a threat in the vicinity before he went off.

"It seems you have a visitor."

Derek got out of the car, resignation in his shoulders, so exhausted but looking like a new man from a few minutes ago. Stiles wasn't quite following. Then again, he wasn't exactly running on all cylinders, either.

They walked up to the front door and Stiles hesitated before turning the knob. They would face this together, as always, but they would face this _together_ and Stiles wanted to make sure Derek knew that. He caught his eyes, those jade gems that made his heart flop over.

Derek got it. He traced the bone of Stiles' cheek and whispered, "No take backs."

"Yeah, no take backs," Stiles agreed, ready to open the door.

Stiles wasn't sure what he was expecting. He wasn't stupid—he knew Derek's "visitor" had something to do with Peter. Stiles thought maybe a second in command like him or something would be here, maybe an omega who broke off from the pack in their outrage over Peter's leadership. Like, that wasn't out of the realm of possibility, was it?

And for some reason, he could only think about Peter as a huge, hulking, gorilla wolf thing like he'd been when Scott had first been bitten. Thinking about Peter this way made it easier to brainstorm ways of killing him. Again.

Because Stiles wasn't a murderer. He wasn't. He was, above all things, a _protector_. Sure, Derek liked to throw his comment to Allison about shooting him in the head in his face all the time, but Stiles contends that he was protecting his pack and Derek was obviously the bigger threat in comparison to three newly turned werewolves.

Also, it has been brought to Stiles' attention before that his words about putting Jackson down had been…hurtful. Well, excuse him for wanting to protect thousands of innocent people's lives when Jackson was literally _turning into a vengeance monster_ and had actively attacked Stiles himself twice at that point.

Stiles wasn't into death for malicious reasons or like because he was evil (though he did like to think that everyone in the universe had an evil twin out there somewhere. What? Comic books had to get that shit from somewhere and Stiles no longer believed in coincidences). But he was a protector, a life preserver, a big fan of not-dying, but he understood that sometimes in order to save the people he loved, someone else had to die. Killing Derek would have saved Lydia and the rest of his pack. Killing Jackson would have saved three or four deaths (including Matt's). And killing Peter for the first time, prevented Scott from having to join a psychopath's pack and probably prevented more multiple homicides. The numbers weren't in on that one yet. Probably because they actually succeeded in killing him and preventing those deaths.

Stiles didn't know what he was expecting, but it definitely was not Peter Hale sitting on his couch with his feet on the coffee table and reading the newspaper.

"Stiles," he said without looking away from the paper, "I didn't expect you to bring a friend."

"What are you doing here?!" Derek demanded, putting his body in front of Stiles. Stiles was totally not the weak one in this relationship, they were totally equals. He didn't need Derek to protect him like this, but he knew Derek's instincts were screaming at him to protect his mate, so Stiles let it go.

"Where'd you even get that newspaper, Peter? Be honest, did you bring it just for effect? Because that sounds like something you would do."

Peter sighed. "I plead the fifth on that one." Peter stood, carefully folding the newspaper and laying it on the couch.

"You didn't answer my question," Derek huffed, still standing stalwart in front of Stiles.

"That's because I don't care." Peter replied, his eyes not leaving Stiles and his hands moving in elegant gestures while he spoke. "Now, Stiles, why did you have to bring him? You never do what I expect you to. That's the brilliant thing about you."

"Ew, you like me because I'm unpredictable? Because I promise you, dude, I am not that enigmatic okay? If there's a burger to eat in front of me, I probably have already eaten it. Not that complicated, really."

"It's a bit more complicated than a _burger_. Last time we actually had a civilized conversation—"

"Oh you mean that forced rapey coffee date at Starbucks where you called my face nubile and told me you wanted to kill your nephew? That conversation?"

"Yes, that conversation." Peter had the gall to look delighted that Stiles remembered. "We were both in agreement that I would make a better alpha than Derek here." He gave Derek a foul look, like something he might have stepped in at a local dog park.

Derek started to growl and Stiles put a hand on his back to try to calm him down. "Whoa whoa whoa, Deaf Vader, that is not at all what I said. I said he was a crappy alpha when he started because he totally was, and he knew it. But I stand by what I said then that he's the best Hale for the job. What conversation were _you_ having, because that's how I remember it."

"I do apologize. Perhaps I was focused on other aspects of _the conversation_."

Stiles wished he could see Derek's face and share a look with him, because ugh his uncle was seriously the grossest man in the world. And his standard of innuendo was much higher normally. Like, come on, at least bring your A game verbally, old man. That was the best way Stiles knew how to fight.

"Peter." Derek warned, his patience already stretched farther than Stiles' had thought it would go. "I have to put you down now."

"Oh, of course you think that's what is going to happen, nephew." Peter looked back to Derek, like part one of his plan was over and he was shifting from ignoring Derek to engaging him. "But we both know that I can take you in an equal fight. We're both alphas now, my boy, and I was the one who taught you how to fight in the first place. How sure are you that I didn't _accidentally_ leave anything out?"

Stiles noticed Derek's right shoulder blade twitch, and he knew Derek was going to try to _trick_ Peter. Derek was going to try to out lie the inventor of the lie. Derek was going to try to manipulate the manipulator.

Derek was going to need his help.

"Derek, maybe you shouldn't do this." Stiles pleaded, knowing in his heart and through their bond or some weird string of the universe that bound them together so tightly that Derek would know he was acting, that he was trying to help.

"Shut up, Stiles. This is something I have to do," Derek roared, "He killed my family, he tried to get my pack killed. He tried to take my second from me."

And that clinched it. If Derek was calling him his second to Peter and not his mate, he had something up his sleeve.

"And now after I kill you, I will take your pack and your second. And also your territory. How does that make you feel, Derek?"

Stiles looked around the room and thought about how his dad was going to kill him when this was over. They would rip this place to shreds. Seriously, they had to have this Final Boss showdown in his home? The Hales are so inconsiderate. Just like that time he bought Cora two tickets to their favorite band for her birthday, and she took some guy she met at school. Inconsiderate.

He looked around the room, already mourning the cleaning he would have to do for the next few days. God, Derek better give him all the blowjobs for this.

"He's not going to be yours, Peter."

"Like he's ever going to be yours? You reek of lust around him, and I bet you never even told him, did you? That you have _feelings_ for the boy. I hope he never plays with matches."

Derek pounced. His clothes shred off him in mid-flight, patches of Stiles' favorite Henley now part of the mess he would have to clean up later.

And they were at it. Peter blocked Derek's claw swipe with his own claws, his monster gorilla/wolf hybrid larger than Derek and even in their alpha forms, less human.

Peter launched himself onto Derek, biting his ear almost clean off until Derek could force him off in a twist that looked extremely uncomfortable to Stiles. They went back and forth, trading blows and snarling like roaring engines.

The room became a shambles, the coffee table shattered under their combined weight. Pictures fell off the wall with the force of two wolves pushing each other into the drywall, bursting through it in many places, dust filtering into the air.

Stiles felt around underneath the couch for his baseball bat without taking his eyes off the wolves. He knew his presence was going unnoticed in this fight, but he didn't want to feel completely vulnerable.

He took a closer look at the two alphas, comparing what he knew of Derek's fighting skills to how he was using them against Peter. And he was amazed.

Derek was purposefully sucking, it looked like. He was making easy mistakes that Stiles had seen him work hard to correct in his own training months ago. He hadn't feinted once and that was like his signature move.

What was Derek playing at?

Stiles scoured the scene while his mind whirled. He was playing up to Peter's arrogance. Yes, that must be it, Stiles thought. Peter hadn't seen Derek fight, really really _fight_ since they attacked the kanima. Peter didn't know that Derek had gotten better and Derek wasn't about to let him know that—because Peter _was_ right about one thing. They were on the same level now—alphas—and Derek would have to more than physically master Peter to ever win a fight against him.

Peter put value on understanding people and their motivations. Stiles got that, he understood Peter worked that way and that it was that exact reason that so attracted Peter to Stiles, because he couldn't predict what he would do. Derek knew his uncle better than Stiles ever would, thank God, and he was using that arrogance against Peter. Derek knew he would have to do something unpredictable to beat Peter at his own game and so he was. He was fighting exactly as Peter expected him to.

Peter clamped his jaw down on Derek's right forearm, and Stiles winced in sympathy. Blood oozed out from the wound. Peter didn't wait around to admire his work, already he was moving again to slash Derek's chest with his claws, gouging Derek's soft belly for the second time in the last day and a half.

Peter backed away, pleasure radiating off of him and he shifted back. Derek followed his lead, looking meek and very badly wounded.

"See Derek," Peter began, proving that the only reason he switched back to human was that he wanted to _talk_. "You can't possibly defeat me. I've won. The Beacon Hills pack is basically mine, I can taste it. I have you in a corner, panting for breath, leaking blood."

"Wow, Peter," Stiles deadpanned, "you should totally be a poet."

Peter turned in rage, "Why are you so happy, human? Your alpha is dying! You will watch him bleed to death in front of you and know you can't do anything about it."

"Well," Stiles said, looking from naked Peter (gross) to an equally naked Derek (hot), "it doesn't look to me like he's going to bleed out."

"What are you talking about? I just clipped his femoral artery in his leg."

"Huh, did you? Well it looks like it's closing now, so…"

Peter looked back over at Derek who was now standing proudly on the other side of the destroyed living room. He had blood all down his leg, his ear, and his stomach, but no wounds.

"What? But I'm an alpha. You shouldn't be able to heal from alpha wounds. I'm not healing from such trifle scratches you gave me! How are you doing that?"

Stiles giggled. He honest to God couldn't help it.

"You see uncle, all those stories you told me about true mates? They're true."

"You don't have a true mate. Last time I saw you, you weren't even marked."

Stiles just had to interject here. "If you look closely, Peter, you'll see that he is indeed marked and mated. It's just there on his shoulder, see it?" Stiles couldn't help the note of pride that crept into his voice while Derek held his head to the side to give them a better view of his mark. "Marked just yesterday too, or maybe the day before that. I'm a little fuzzy on the timeline. So you really couldn't have picked a better day to attack. Although, I would have enjoyed a few more hours in bed—so, thanks for these bags," he pointed to his eyes and Peter just gave this disgusted and confused face. It was the most hilarious look Stiles had ever seen on his face, and there was that one time they went shopping for paint to lighten up Derek's apartment and Stiles suggested magenta.

"You?" Peter asked, still confused. "You're Derek mate?"

Was Peter giving Stiles sympathy crazy, or was Peter actually sounding sad about that? Stiles pushed his chin up and looked Peter directly in the eyes, his serious business persona taking over. This was done now. Stiles was done with Peter being in _their_ territory, judging _their_ mate bond before they'd even gotten to tell their pack, and Stiles was not going to tolerate him saying anything negative about it.

"Yes, and I'm damn proud to be. So you're going to lose, Peter. Derek's been playing you this whole time. He can heal the wounds you give him and he's stronger with me dead or alive. We've mated and that's going to give him an edge you'll never have."

"Oh so that's how it is." Peter tried to maintain his superiority, but Stiles could sense the cracks in the façade.

"Yeah," Derek said from the other side of the room, "that's how it is and that's how it's always going to be. Even if you did kill me now, you'd have to kill him too to get the Hale alpha powers."

This was news to Stiles. "Really?" He asked.

"Later Stiles," Derek walked across the room, power and authority coming off of him strongly, like he had been repressing them before and now unleashed the restraint.

Peter bowed before him like a tree in a storm, the wolf recognizing Derek's alpha as higher. A mated alpha trumped an undead uncle, and Peter cowed before Derek. Derek spoke to his uncle, his voice scary in how quiet and controlled it sounded in the destroyed room around them.

"If this were six months ago, I would let you leave now. But it isn't. I let you back into the pack against Stiles' intuition. I let you knowingly manipulate me when Boyd and Erica left the pack because I didn't want to lose the last member of my family again. But you've lost that privilege." Derek looked over at Stiles with affection before returning to Peter. "The pack is my family now. Cora and Stiles are my family, and you are in the way of their happiness because _I'm_ their happiness. I didn't used to think that I could be that for anyone, but Stiles makes me believe it. That I deserve happiness. And you aren't going to ruin that for me again." He ended his speech by slitting Peter's throat with his claws before his nefarious uncle could offer a reply or do something else stupid like beg for his life.

For the second time in his young life, Stiles watched the light fade out of Peter's eyes.

"I'll call Isaac," he murmured, watching Derek who was crouched in front of Peter, unmoving. "He'll take care of the body and all the blood around here. I'll make sure he's cremated this time. And Isaac can get Scott to deal with the Breakfast Club pack."

"Okay," Derek responded, sounding as old as a millennia. It was a testament to how tired he was that he didn't comment on the ridiculous nickname Stiles had given the invading pack. "Let's go back to bed."

"Yeah. That sounds nice," he eyed the blood starting to dry on Derek's body, "but shower first."

"Okay."

"C'mon, get up. That's an alpha command, you know. Don't think you're getting out of talking about that one, mister."

Finally Derek's dead face morphed into the smallest of smiles. "Wouldn't dream of it."

Later that night found Stiles washing Derek once again in the shower. "Don't get used to this, big guy. I'm not your manservant or anything. You can wash yourself as far as I'm concerned. This is just like a one-time thing. Two-time thing. But not, you know, like _two timing_. Because that's totally different. And not allowed here."

Stiles tried in vain to fill the silence between them. Derek was usually taciturn, but hadn't been that way around Stiles since the early days of their acquaintance. When Derek wasn't arguing with him, or teasing him, or confessing parts of his past, he was commenting on how stupid the movie Stiles picked out was and how they should have gone with _Inception _again because who doesn't love Leo and also dream architects? And when he wasn't belittling Stiles' taste in movies, clothes, and music, he was defending his own, because Derek just didn't understand that no one liked Nickleback in an un-ironic _or_ ironic way and that he needed to find something else that spoke to his man pain.

So Stiles didn't really know how to treat such a quiet Derek. Last night he'd been exhausted from the fight and in enormous amounts of pain.

Today, he was exhausted from a long day of searching fruitlessly for his uncle, but in the grand scheme of things, it wasn't actually that draining of a _confrontation_. It went pretty quickly all in all. It was still long enough to destroy the living room, but Derek spent more energy healing his wounds than he did actively fighting his uncle. Also, he wasn't in enormous amounts of physical pain. This was all emotional pain, and Stiles wasn't exactly the best suited to comforting emotional pain. With Isaac, he just drove him to therapy and let him talk to Scott and Allison about everything. Cora just kind of repressed her shit and seemed fine, who was he to project his opinion on her? Boyd dealt with his family stuff on his own and with a bit of help from Erica.

But Derek's emotional pain was Stiles' responsibility to assuage. It was his right as his mate and his duty to comfort him. But it was more than that. Stiles _wanted _to—he wanted to help take that away from Derek, to cleanse Derek's soul from all this pain that the world had caused him. He hated the thought of Derek walking around with two rainclouds over his head, named Peter and Kate, forever.

He wanted to be the sunlight that broke through those clouds. He wanted to be the wind that pushed them away. He wanted to be the daring pilot from an '80's movie that dangerously flew through those clouds and found a paradise on the other side.

He wanted Derek to be happy. He just wasn't sure how to do that.

"Hey," he said, internally giving up on ignoring the problem until it went away. "Hey, look at me." He grabbed Derek's cheek and maneuvered his face to be right in front of his. "You did what you had to do. Why is this bothering you so much?"

"I just—" Derek choked out. Stiles grabbed the shampoo and started to soap up Derek's hair.

"You just what?" Stiles gently asked, hoping to get Derek to open up to him. "Hey, it's just me here. Just you and me in this shower, okay? You know you can tell me anything and I'm not going to judge you. You're already stuck with me, okay? No take backs. We said no take backs."

Derek looked intensely into Stiles' eyes and then placed his head in the crook of Stiles' neck, needing the smell to comfort him, or maybe just not wanting to look Stiles in the eye when he finally gave in. "I don't want you to see me being a monster."

"You mean going alpha?" Stiles asked, a little bewildered. His hands paused in Derek's hair. "Because, dude, I'm the one that helped you reach that—I think I've seen you alpha more than anyone else and it's never bothered me."

"No, I mean…" Derek shook his head furiously into Stiles' neck, lifting his mouth up to come behind Stiles' ear. "I don't want you to see me being a _monster_. Not alpha."

"Derek, why would I think you were a monster back there?" He pulled Derek's head in closer to himself, putting the skin of Derek's forehead against the skin of his pulse—needing to feel more of Derek who wouldn't push their bodies together.

"I just killed my own uncle," he bit out in one harsh breath. "In front of you. I'm supposed to protect you, not freak you out."

Oh, so that's what was bothering Derek. "Let me set you straight, Der-bear. Or, you know, _not straight_. Get it?" Derek didn't look amused and Stiles jumped back on track, slipping into his alpha tone so that Derek would understand his seriousness. "Look, I've seen you kill many people and supernatural beasts before, alright? And I've never been freaked out. I've seen you kill Peter twice now, and you know what? Both times I was grateful to you. I was glad to see him go both times because he was the only monster around."

Derek didn't seem very convinced. "Besides," Stiles continued, kind of on a self-righteous roll now. "When have I ever been quiet on things that bug me about you? Have I ever not told you when I thought you were being a dick? Does that sound like me?"

Stiles could feel him cave. He could feel Derek fall off the teeter totter on the right side. "You're right. You only don't talk to me about things when they have to do with your _feelings_ for me."

Stiles gaped. Full on large-mouth bass here. "Hey, who had to talk about their feelings first, huh douche?"

"I brought it up," Derek pointed out.

Stiles laughed to himself, "Yeah, if I remember correctly we were standing right here when you _brought it up_." And that, he thought to himself, was how you did a proper innuendo, Peter.

"Oh my God, Stiles, did you really just say that?" Derek asked with a bit of shampoo suds starting to fall down his face and into his eyes.

"Why are you even surprised, dude?"

"Don't call me dude." He responded immediately, "And definitely don't call me Der-bear ever again."

"Just for that I'm going to scream Der-bear next time you make me come."

"You little shit."

"See, now that's a good nickname. See how open I am about nicknames? You could take a leaf out of my book." Stiles rinsed the soap out of Derek's hair, he wasn't making it easy.

"You mean and not stop talking for hours?" Stiles let the soap drift down Derek's back and torso, and followed it with his fingers, honing in on his nipples.

"Well I like to force you to shut me up. Back before we lost the spark," he teased, like they'd even been together long enough for anything about their romance to have fizzled out. They were a conflagration together, they were the grand finale of fireworks, they were the sun's core. "You used to push me into walls and now you just—"

Derek blurred in front of him and suddenly Stiles felt the slippery wall of the shower beneath his back and a hot and horny werewolf against his front. "—push me into walls."

"Stiles?"

"Yes, my love?"

"Let's see if I can get you to call me Der-bear again."

And then he put something in Stiles' mouth that forced him to shut up.

"What are we going to tell the pack?" Derek asked as he slipped under the covers on his side of Stiles' bed.

Stiles loved that he officially had a side of the bed. Before it was just assumed that Derek would sleep on that side if they ever had to bunk together, but now it was like, Derek would be there a lot. Like all the time. And he was eighteen and his dad can't say anything about arresting Derek.

Stiles has seriously never been so happy in his entire life. And that included the midnight premiere of _Avengers_. Seriously, there had been curly fries before and after the movie.

"Well I guess we're going to tell them we got over ourselves and are together now? It's not like they'll be surprised."

"What?" Derek's eyebrows drew together. "They know? You told them already?"

"No, doofus. But Scott knows because I had a bit of a freak out when I found out about true mates, you remember that? When Scott and Isaac asked me to research mates and Scott freaked out at my voicemail and called the entire pack to my house?"

"I didn't realize that was when you… realized." Derek replied, flipping onto his side to stare at Stiles while he talked. "Were you really that freaked out?"

"That this hot guy who was four hundred times out of my league and an alpha werewolf and super grouchy that was the sole reason I found out I was bisexual was my freaking soul mate and probably wanted nothing to do with me? Yeah, I had a bit of an existential crisis, okay? Lydia forced me to eat curly fries at Maybelle's for like two hours that day after school."

"She forced you, huh?"

"Well, she put the opportunity in front of me, alright?"

"Ah ha, the truth comes out."

"Oh yeah, alright, whatever," he hit Derek lightly on the side of his stupidly gorgeous face, "at least my truth has come out, you've been mighty silent over there, Mr. Broody."

"I'm not broody."

"The truth is still not coming out, because that was a blatant lie."

"Fine, whatever. What do you want to know?"

Stiles felt more vulnerable than he was comfortable with, even in front of Derek, when he asked, "When did you…realize?"

Derek was silent for a moment, gathering his thoughts. "I didn't see the mark until you pointed it out at my place that day. I knew it was you the second I looked at it. It wasn't even because your birthday was the last one in the pack—I mean, it literally could have been anybody in the world who had turned eighteen in the last week or so since your birthday."

"It was a little longer than a week, I'd already been tortured by the dreams for a lot longer than that, but go on."

"Like I said, I just looked at it and knew. There wasn't anyone else who could be my mate. I don't know if that's how it works, like you just _know_, but that tendril I'd always kind of felt for you, it like, I don't know," he trailed off.

"Use your words." Stiles patronized to hide his glee. Derek had always had a little thing for him?

"It was like, that annoying thing about you that made you my second, that made you my co-alpha, it was more than just having a good head for research and strategy, more than bringing the pack together, it was my wolf recognizing you as an extension of me that made me trust you and that in turn made you those things that you were."

"Did you just take credit for me bringing the pack together?" Stiles asked, unimpressed.

"No, Stiles, I'm trying to explain it."

"Well say it again and this time try not to make it sound like you're the end all be all of everything that is Stiles. Just because I was born because you needed a mate doesn't mean I'm like your slave or something."

"I know, Stiles, trust me I know. You're not my manservant."

"Explain. Please."

"It's like a weird chicken or the egg thing. Are you amazing at dealing with the pack because the universe knew that one day I would be alpha and I would need you, or are you just naturally that way and fell into the role because the need was there?"

"I don't like to give the universe too much credit, Derek. Yeah, it brought me to you, but it didn't do any of the hard work that we've done. The universe made me a possible option for you, but it didn't choose this for us. We had other options, you were in love before you met me. And I had that thing for Lydia for so many years. We are our own people and the universe doesn't get to take credit for my hard work anymore than you do."

They sat in silence for a minute, greeting it like an old friend.

"So what are we going to tell the pack?" Derek asked again.

"That mommy and daddy are getting un-divorced?"

"The opposite of divorce is not un-divorce it's—"

"Too early for that, so I went with un-divorce. So sue me."

"It is too early for that," Derek agreed, nuzzling his nose against Stiles', "but you're it for me. There isn't anyone else and there never will be."

Stiles nodded, his nose hitting Derek's as it moved up and down. "We did say no take backs."

"I love you, you idiot." Derek said fondly, his words not matching the blazing look in his eyes. He punctuated it with a kiss to Stiles' open mouth.

Stiles grinned, he would never get tired of hearing that. "Yeah, I love you too, Thor."

"Does that make you Jane?"

"I think I'm supposed to take offense to that, but have you seen Natalie Portman rock the buzz cut? We look eerily alike on the hotness level, so yeah, I'll totally be your Jane."

They talked into the night until they fell asleep with their limbs intertwined and their hearts in sync.

The next morning, Stiles awoke to the feeling that someone was watching him. And he knew it wasn't Derek because he was spooned up behind him and staring at the back of his head. Stiles carefully turned and there, standing just above them with a strange combination of amusement and anger was the sheriff.

"I held off on your promise of pancakes because there was an emergency or whatever. But this morning," he pointed to Derek, "there better be fucking pancakes. And extra syrup."

The sheriff turned on his heel and walked out the door. Stiles pushed his face into his pillow, hoping he could smother himself to death. He heard chuckling next to him, Derek's entire body was shaking in his mirth. That wasn't fair.

"What do you think you're laughing at?"

"Your life."

"Well at least someone finds it amusing." But Stiles was laughing by then too.

"And you better CLEAN UP THIS LIVING ROOM, STILES!" His dad screamed from downstairs.

They just giggled even harder.

"ARE THESE SHREDDED CLOTHES? STILES!"


End file.
